


Sher Trek: A Study In Darkness

by CaresaToland



Series: Sher Trek Pilot Miniseries [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sherlock (TV) Fusion, Alternate Universe - Star Trek Fusion, Dying Redshirts, Episode: s01e26 The Devil In the Dark, Johnlock - Freeform, M/M, Treklock, miniseriesapril2017, redshirts - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-20
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-21 10:30:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10683462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaresaToland/pseuds/CaresaToland
Summary: Captain John Watson and the StarshipEnterpriseare ordered to Janus VI, where a series of mysterious killings have halted production of the vital mineral pergium. But Watson’s orders to get the mining facility up and running aren’t made any simpler by his brilliant new First Officer’s stubborn insistence that the deaths aren’t what they seem — or by the discovery that a hitherto unknown alien species is threatened with destruction. Watson must now risk his new command on the deductions of a regulations-averse Vulcan and the slim chance that if the humans in this situation won’t see sense, maybe the aliens will…





	1. TEASER

**Author's Note:**

> Please visit the writer's blog at [caresatoland.tumblr.com](http://caresatoland.tumblr.com) for more info on the Sher Trek Pilot Miniseries, which is part of [FallTVSeasonSherlock's](http://falltvseasonsherlock.tumblr.com) [Miniseries April.](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/miniseriesapril2017)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note: only this chapter is in script format. All others are prose.

TEASER

FADE IN:

         CONTINUITY (V.O.)  
Previously on Sher Trek…

EXT. STARFLEET COMMAND SAN FRANCISCO, ESTABLISHING—MORNING

INT. STARFLEET TRANSIENTS ACCOMMODATION, AN OFFICER’S QUARTERS—CONTINUOUS

Angle on what seems to be A BARE WALL. A hand comes INTO SHOT, touches a PANEL  
on the wall. The wall turns into a MIRROR, revealing CAPTAIN JOHN WATSON in the  
act of tugging a Command-gold Starfleet uniform tunic down into place. He glances at  
the braid on his sleeve, then looks at himself in the mirror and slowly smiles one of  
those John Watson half-smiles. An expression of tremendous (if restrained) satisfaction  
and excitement.

SFX: COMMUNICATOR CHIRP behind him. He turns to pick it up from the nearby desk,  
remaining visible in the mirror: flips it open.

         WATSON  
Watson here.

The voice that speaks to him sounds like it’s in pain.

         MURRAY  
John? Sorry, mate—you’re gonna  
need—another XO.

Watson stares at the communicator, incredulous.

         WATSON  
Dave? Where are you?

         MURRAY  
Fleet Hospital. Trauma ICU.

         WATSON  
_Shit!_

Watson rushes OUT OF SHOT, LIMPING slightly. SFX of the quarters door WHOOSHING  
OPEN AND CLOSED.

CUT TO:

INT. STARFLEET COMMAND, COMMODORE STAMFORD’S OFFICE—DAY

OFF SFX of his door WHOOSHING open, COMMODORE MIKE STAMFORD is standing up  
from behind his desk as Captain Watson ENTERS.

         STAMFORD  
John, what’re you doing here?  
Thought we’d said our goodbyes  
at the party last night.

         WATSON  
Yeah, well last night Dave Murray  
hadn’t gone for a last-chance morning  
ski run in Nepal and snapped his  
spine in three places.

Stamford’s eyes widen.

         STAMFORD  
Bloody hell. Is he—

Watson shakes his head wearily, pinches the bridge of his nose,

         WATSON  
He’s fine. They finished fabricating  
his new vertebrae this morning.  
Spinal cord’ll finish regenning  
tomorrow or the next day. Full  
recovery in a couple of weeks.

         STAMFORD  
Thank God. Doesn’t help you today,  
though. No way they’ll clear him  
to ship out before he’s stable.

         WATSON  
Dammit, Commodore, Dave Murray was  
the best First Officer a man could  
hope for! Where’m I supposed to find  
another XO in six hours?  
      (scowling)  
So damn much bad luck, Mike. All  
the delays and hitches. Then things  
improved a bit and I actually started  
thinking they’d turned around. Now  
this! It’s like the universe is  
conspiring against me.

Stamford looks at him strangely, then LAUGHS.

         WATSON  
What?

         STAMFORD  
You're the second person to say  
that to me today.

         WATSON  
     (puzzled)  
Who was the first?

CUT TO:

INT. STARFLEET TRANSIENT CREW ACCOMMODATION–SHORTLY AFTER

Stamford leads Watson down a corridor.

         WATSON  
You sure we've got time for this?

         STAMFORD  
I’m betting you’ll thank me later.

A sudden, small EXPLOSION shakes the hallway. A door ahead of them JUMPS  
PARTLY OPEN: a cloud of SMOKE BILLOWS out. SFX of ALARMS going off.

         WATSON  
Did you bet a lot?

Alarmed, he jogs ahead.

INT. TRANSIENT OFFICER’S QUARTERS–CONTINUOUS

The room is cluttered with possessions–electronics, padds, even books. A door  
on one side leads to sleeping quarters. On the other side the desk area has been  
extended with a table into a sort of lab bench; this is half covered with futuristic  
equipment and glassware. But some of the glassware and equipment is now shattered  
and smoking. Sprawled on the floor nearby is a long lean figure in a blue Starfleet  
Science tunic with lieutenant-commander’s stripes.

While Stamford hits a wall plate to shut off the alarms, Watson hurriedly kneels  
by the fallen man, helps him turn over.

         WATSON  
Hey, let me help. You all right?

As the man on the floor rolls over and half sits up, Watson sees that he’s a Vulcan,  
of unusually striking looks even for someone from that species—dark-haired, high-  
cheekboned, grey-eyed, with a long, presently deadpan face that is handsome in none  
of the usual ways. His gaze MEETS Watson’s for a long moment. Then, without even a  
glance at John’s sleeves—

         SH’LOK  
Quite all right, Captain, thank  
you. The compound was simply more  
unstable than originally hoped.

         WATSON  
      (blinks)  
Than originally _hoped?_

         SH’LOK  
Yes, apparently the purity of key  
components in this last experiment  
left something to be desired. However,  
best practice requires that they be  
sourced on the black market to produce  
situation-neutral results. I must  
conclude that ‘honor among thieves’  
is increasingly a lost concept, as  
quality control always seems to be  
an issue…

Both amused and bemused, Watson finishes helping the Vulcan up. He wobbles  
a bit, and Watson steadies him for a moment while glancing around at the destruction.

         WATSON  
      (amused)  
I’d say “live long and prosper,”  
though your ideas about how that  
looks would seem… unique.

The Vulcan regards Watson as if seeing something quite unprecedented.

         STAMFORD  
Captain John Watson—Lieutenant  
Commander Sh’lok. An old friend  
of mine.

         SH’LOK  
A pleasure, Captain. Rigel Five or  
Axanar?

Watson‘s eyebrows go up in surprise.

         WATSON  
Sorry?

         SH’LOK  
Or perhaps I should say, _Constellation_  
or _Enterprise?_

Watson is gobsmacked. He glances at Stamford.

         WATSON  
You told him about me?

         STAMFORD  
Not a word.

Stamford smiles. And off Sh’lok goes.

         SH’LOK  
It’s actually quite obvious, Captain.  
Your tan is that of an Earth-human  
of northern European heritage who’s  
recently spent time on a world in a  
star system with a type B blue-white  
giant star. Not _much_ time, however,  
which suggests a relatively brief and  
eventful planetside mission. The tan  
lines at your collar and, yes, your  
wrists as well, make it plain that  
you burned before you tanned, having  
missed an injection of one of the  
systemic UV-radiation blockers.

John is intrigued, and unconcerned about hiding it.

         WATSON  
“Eventful?”

         SH’LOK  
Plainly your chief medical officer  
and ship’s medical team were too  
overstretched due to casualty care  
to deal with routine administration  
of topical drugs. But then your  
travels took you to the neighborhood  
of yet another type B star, this  
time on a less trying mission during  
which you had time to be administered  
a dose of cyalothrin before transport,  
so that the resultant tan line is  
less marked and is fading more quickly  
than the other. The second mission,  
however, allowed no time for planetside  
R&R, suggesting that you received news  
of a change in circumstance requiring  
your recall to Earth. The only areas  
where there have recently been military  
or paramilitary operations involving  
Starfleet personnel and vessels and  
which are both type B star systems are  
Rigel and Axanar. Knowing that hostilities  
recently ended in the Axanar conflict  
and that some Starfleet officers involved  
were scheduled to return to receive  
commendations, and knowing that some of  
them in light of their service records  
were in line to receive promotions or  
assignment to new vessels, or both, and  
having routinely noted the arrival of  
one new starship in orbit and that the  
Quartermaster’s office had just signed  
off on the spaceworthiness certificate  
of another, the more germane question  
therefore becomes not “Rigel Five or  
Axanar”, which was perhaps not as  
nuanced as it might have been, but  
“ _Constellation_ or _Enterprise_?”

Watson stares at him in delighted astonishment.

         WATSON  
That… was amazing!

Sh’lok shrugs, trying to look nonchalant, but (unused to such wholehearted  
approval) can’t quite manage it.

         SH’LOK  
You think so?

         WATSON  
      (in wonder)  
It was extraordinary. Quite  
extraordinary!

         SH’LOK  
That’s not what people normally  
say.

         WATSON  
What do they normally say?

         SH’LOK  
     (with a small ironic grin)  
_Mesht kroykah._

Watson meets that expression, so uncharacteristic for Vulcans, with a half-smile  
of his own, then glances at the Commodore

         STAMFORD  
Mr. Sh’lok is a graduate fellow of the  
Vulcan Science Academy and a recipient  
of the Vulcan Scientific Legion of Honor,  
the—

         SH’LOK  
—Starfleet Citation of Conspicuous  
Gallantry, the Ceti Star First Class…  
      (eyeroll)  
Dull.

         WATSON  
      (gobsmacked again)  
Sorry, acquiring those was dull? 

         SH’LOK  
Captain Watson, I am a scientist. Anything  
that impedes discovery and the search for  
the universe’s hidden truths is in the final  
analysis a waste of time and a bore.

         STAMFORD  
Mr. Sh’lok completed a tour of duty with  
USS _Intrepid_ last month. He’s taken some  
leave time on Earth to consider his, ah,  
further career options—

         SH’LOK  
     (haughty, annoyed)  
Was _forced_ to take leave, Commodore,  
pending reassignment. But considering  
the regrettable unavailability of the  
few vessels on which an officer with a  
rudimentary understanding of the sciences  
and a functioning brain might sensibly  
have sought a billet, I've had little  
choice but to occupy myself with independent  
research in such fields as forensics  
while I wait for conditions to… alter.

Just a hint of frustration on that last word; the tiniest crack in the armour.  
Sh’lok meanwhile looks around and realizes that his quarters look like a tip, and  
this might put off other sentient beings, especially ones who interest him—or that  
he wants to interest in turn. With easy grace and a seeming nonchalance that would  
probably fool most people, Sh’lok begins moving around the space and tidying it.

         SH’LOK (CONT’D)  
And while Earth is unquestionably  
a fruitful venue for the pursuit of  
such studies, being due to its human  
population a veritable festival of  
larceny, malfeasance, and all the most  
sordid sorts of crime—

         WATSON  
Mr. Sh’lok, one minute. I need to be  
clear on this. You’re just in from a  
tour and you want to go right out again?

         SH’LOK  
Yes, Captain, though as I say those  
vessels in which I had an interest  
regrettably proved unexpectedly  
unavailable for one reason or another,  
and those that remained revealed  
themselves on investigation to be  
grossly unsuitable, so that—

During this, Watson and Stamford exchange a surreptitious look. John sees it all.  
This proud and brilliant and abrasive man is a touch too strange for the by-the-book,  
don’t-rock-the-boat types who tend to command humanoid-crewed starships. Or else he’s  
not Vulcan enough to suit their preconceptions. Or both.

As Sh’lok turns to start tidying another piece of busted equipment, Watson PUTS OUT  
A HAND to stop him.

         WATSON  
Mr. Sh’lok.

Sh’lok STANDS STILL in surprise. No change in his face, but his eyes are guarded: he’s  
ready for the next rejection.

         WATSON  
Commander, assuming the universe is  
done surprising me for today, _Enterprise_  
warps out for M-113 and points beyond  
in six hours. If you’ve nothing else  
that needs blowing up in the short  
term and you think you might be free  
to look around my ship, I’d appreciate it.  
Because I stand in serious need  
of a First Officer. Assuming you’d be  
willing to serve with a new commander  
in a ship on her shakedown voyage. And  
on the new long mission schedule…

         SH’LOK  
A five year mission.

John NODS. A beat—

Sh’lok’s eyes go fierce and glad. He produces just a scrap of smile, but it could  
light the room.

         SH’LOK  
Oh gods, yes.

Watson GESTURES toward the door.

         WATSON  
Then we’ll send someone for all this  
in a bit, because we’ve got a lot to  
do before we break orbit, and only  
six hours to do it.

Sh’lok NODS at him and heads out the door.

         SH’LOK  
Five hours, thirty-eight minutes,  
sixteen seconds, Captain.

John does a TAKE at this, then FOLLOWS, throwing a bemused “thank you” glance at  
Commodore Stamford. Stamford looks after them with a GRIN as they exit.

INT. CORRIDOR — CONTINUOUS

Captain John H. Watson and Mr. Sh’lok walk side by side TOWARD CAMERA: glancing  
once with speculative appreciation at each other, then back toward POV—and the future.  
The adventure begins…

BLACK SCREEN

RUN TITLES


	2. ACT ONE

_Captain’s log, stardate 3288 point, uh, three eight. We are now a little more than four months into our five-year mission and running into what’s probably no more than the normal amount of trouble for a vessel designed to go looking for it and then cope with the results. The crew are immersed in the business of getting to know each other well and settling in to work together smoothly, a process I’ve seen in all my commands before… but never with a crew of this size, never in a ship this size. When you step back from it the challenge of keeping it all running smoothly seems daunting. All you can do is take it one day at a time, one job at a time, and do your best to make it work. At least the crew seems as committed to this goal as I am._

_For all the similarities to past commands, though, this one is unique. It has its  own problems, its own low points and high points, its own quirks. And one of these is unquestionably my first officer: one of a kind, like_ Enterprise _herself. I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who so perfectly embodies the concept of genius. His knowledge is encyclopedic and his competence at almost any task of which he’s capable is genuinely extraordinary. Without fail Mr. Sh’lok rises to every challenge offered him… but never, ever in any way you might expect. Which sometimes makes even average days on board more interesting than usual…_

 

* * *

 

Another morning, another day, and John Watson stepped down into the Bridge to stand for a moment beside the center seat and try not to let it show that he was thinking (as he had for every one of the past ninety mornings or so), _How am I this lucky?_ It was ridiculous.

No one noticed, fortunately. That was as he preferred it. He’d made it plain from the first morning he sat in this chair that he didn’t expect any jumping-to-attention, “Captain-on-the-bridge” formality from his Bridge crew when he turned up. They all had work to do that was far more important than stroking his ego.

So matters unfolded as they usually did. People nodded at him as he entered, no more: and as he paused by the center seat, watching the stars pour past on the viewscreen, Rand came over from her station and passed Watson the padd with the last shift’s handoff notes from each major department. He stood there a moment more, scanning down them, seeing that nothing urgent leapt out to be noticed: signed off on them with the padd’s stylus and handed it back to Rand. And then, and not a moment sooner, the baritone voice from behind him said, “Good morning, Captain.”

“Mr. Sh’lok,” John said, dropping into the center seat and swiveling toward his First Officer. “Report?”

“For the moment we are continuing along our previously scheduled patrol route, sir. We passed 21 Carinae fifty-six minutes ago.”

“For the moment?” Watson said. “Implying that we won’t be for long.”

Mr. Sh’lok glanced at Lieutenant Donovan. “Just received a distress call from a mining-facility planet around Alphecca,” Donovan said from her post. “A place called Janus Six.”

Watson blinked. “Where the pergium comes from?”

Sh’lok raised his eyebrows. “You know the planet, Captain?”

“A lot of old style reactors depend on the stuff as a primer dose for the initial fusion reaction,” John said. “And Janus VI is one of the very few sources on this side of the galaxy. A whole sector’s economy depends on the mining facility’s pergium production – so the planet has strategic importance to the Federation as well.” He glanced at Donovan. “What’s their problem?”

“They’ve had a string of deaths in the last month or so,” Donovan said. “According to the message, something down in the mine has been killing the miners, and they seem unable to stop it. The facility’s on the point of shutting down.”

Watson shook his head. “Can’t have that,” he said. He turned to glance over at the helmsman. “Mr. Dimmock, set course for Janus VI and notify Starfleet of the change in our forward schedule.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Sh’lok quirked an eyebrow. “Captain, this means that _Enterprise_ will miss its arrival time for the opening of the human-Orion diplomatic initiative on Mizar IX.”

“Can’t be helped, Mr. Sh’lok,” Watson said. “An actual threat to life so close to our patrol corridor will always be more of a priority than some meeting to set a timetable to form a steering committee to determine the venue for talks meant to eventually start sorting out the Orions. Assuming they _can_ be sorted out. Anyway, Fleet’ll just send another starship. Last I heard, both _Odyssey_ and _Hood_ were in the neighborhood – “

“Fifty-eight point two parsecs to Galactic hubward and a hundred and twelve point six parsecs to the armward, respectively–“

Watson had to smile. “Sh’lok, lately you don’t even _bother_ looking at the computer half the time. If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were showing off.”

Sh’lok produced a faintly offended look that told John that was _exactly_ what he had been doing. Nonetheless the Vulcan shrugged, and said, “Meretricious, sir. When on patrol, knowing exactly where assistance can be found—should support be required—is merely a logical precaution.”

“Or where they’re likely to be found should they require _ours,_ ” John said. “No arguments there.” He looked toward the helm. “Time to planetfall, Mr. Dimmock?”

“Six hours fifty-four minutes at warp six, sir.”

“Very well. Increase to warp seven. This is life-or-death stuff for them; wouldn’t be kind to keep them waiting.”

“Four hours thirty minutes then, Captain,” Dimmock said.

“Noted.” John got up out of the center seat and stretched. “I see from the morning reports that our Chief Engineer’s out of sorts about the starboard nacelle—something to do with one of the antimatter converters. Best have a look in, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Sh’lok? And then, who knows, after lunch and before we get to Janus VI, there might be time for me to finish beating you at chess.”

Sh’lok looked up from his hooded viewer with the merest twitch of the corner of his mouth — one that John was learning by experience foreshadowed a rather feral smile. “Captain,” he said, “to _finish_ beating someone at a game implies that one has actually _begun_ to beat them. An assertion for which I must confess I have as yet seen insufficient evidence.”

John grinned. “Why Sh’lok, you wound me to the quick. And before I’ve even had a second cuppa to cushion the blow.”

“In any case, Captain, your sentiment is, may I say, most ambitious.”

“What’s life without a little ambition?” John said. “Let’s go.”

 

* * *

 

Four hours and thirty minutes later, John had made his normal start-of-shift rounds, put his head at least briefly into the offices of all his department heads, endured a long and theoretically edifying technical lecture from his Chief Engineer, paused for two chicken sandwiches and that second cuppa, and then a third—during which in a corner of the Officers’ Mess he was soundly beaten over the three-D chessboard by Mr. Sh’lok. The Vulcan described John’s defeat as resulting from “a variant of the Polish Sicilian Level-2 Countergambit Collapsed”.  John was sorely tempted to look this up just to determine whether the thing actually existed or if the grandiose name had been coined by his First Officer in order to prank him (for his own idiosyncratic version of Vulcan pranking).

 _Four months ago I’d have doubted there was any such thing,_ John thought as he headed for the Transporter Room a few minutes early to await the rest of the landing party. _Now, though…_ The Captain of the _Enterprise_ had gradually been discovering that between his genius and his dual heritage, Sh’lok was very much a law unto himself—easily qualifying as the most human Vulcan John had ever known. _Or the most Vulcan human…_ And as the earliest weeks of the _Enterprise’s_ mission unfolded, as routines bedded in and people started getting used to them and to each other, John had begun to discover that Vulcans did indeed have a sense of humour. Or his First Officer did… one that expressed itself only guardedly at first until it was sure that it was welcome, and in company that was willing to understand it. Then it took previously unsuspected forms.

John momentarily found himself wondering if, when he went looking for evidence of the Polish Sicilian Whatever-It-Was in the ship’s computer, he would in fact find it—not because it had ever previously existed, but because for his own amusement Sh’lok had gone out of his way to create an apparently-substantiating entry in the ship’s data banks for John to find. _He’s got the skills to do it undetectably…_ The concept amused him strangely.

John smiled. _He’s not above yanking my chain in his very Vulcan way, about illogic and so forth. If I do find that entry, whether it’s real or not, it’d be funny to yank back a bit and accuse him of having faked the evidence._ He knew that Vulcans found the whole concept of lying morally repugnant. But in watching Sh’lok carefully over their initial missions, John had quickly seen that his First Officer was quite expert at finding ways to avoid telling the unvarnished truth when his duty or his own ethics required it. It would be interesting to float the “You’re making that up, aren’t you” concept and see whether Sh’lok went all indignant at the very idea, suddenly changed the subject, or just raised one of those expressive eyebrows at his Captain and told him he was in check again.

John filed the concept away for further consideration in advance of being beaten again (which he certainly would be) as the Transporter Room doors whooshed open for him. Except for Mr. Anderson, the most senior Transporter tech, he was the first in. “You’re early, Anderson. Very good. All sorted?”

“Locked in on the facility’s reception area, Captain,” Anderson said, glancing up only briefly before going back to double-checking his settings. “It’s a pretty long way down under the surface, though. You like to be sure of your targeting in a situation like this…”

John nodded, expecting nothing less. _I know at least one person who won’t be happy in this situation no matter how good the targeting is,_ he thought. But it wasn’t a concern he was going to voice out loud.

 He turned his attention to the wall-mounted viewscreen on which Janus VI rotated seemingly benignly below _Enterprise_ as she swung into standard orbit. From the morning rounds to the chessboards, none of the day’s events so far had presented any real surprises. _It’s been a quiet couple of weeks, too. Which means the trend’s most likely about to break._ And a slight pleasurable shiver slid down the Captain’s spine. 

A second after feeling it, John made a brief exasperated face at himself. He knew perfectly well that it wasn’t a good idea for a starship’s commanding officer to get too fond of the excitement that often enough broke out in the course of duty. With his advise-the-Captain hat on, Bones had more than once had occasion to warn him about the tendency. _And I really do my best to keep it under control. Honestly. Truly…_ But sometimes it was hard. He was after all living his dream, day by day—the antidote to the hopeless helpless yearnings of a rural Midlands kid who’d started to believe that nothing would ever happen to him. At long last, over these last couple of years since leaving the Academy, and most especially now, things had seriously begun to happen… and there was nothing that was going to keep him from enjoying it. 

 _Just not_ too _much,_ John thought, _because you’ve got four hundred thirty-eight lives to think about besides your own. And sometimes more, like now._ He turned his attention back to the viewscreen. _Janus VI…_

The doors whooshed open and Sh’lok came in, mostly focused on making last-minute adjustments to his tricorder. When he looked up after a moment, John nodded to him and turned his attention back to the planet they were orbiting. All in all, it wasn’t much to look at: a smallish class H world swirled with white cloud, its cold arid surface drifted dun and white with sand and ancient dingy water ice, and pockmarked with enough craters to suggest that its present atmosphere had not always been in place. “Mr. Sh’lok, you reviewed the planet’s physical history on the way in,” John said. “Any evidence of solar instability? Or magnetic field trouble?”

Apparently satisfied with his tricorder, Sh’lok was now checking his phaser, but he paused to glance up at the viewscreen, then shook his head. “Nothing more recent than a microflare at the beginning of the present geological period, seven hundred thousand years ago, and a polar shift some two hundred fifty thousand years later, going by the crustal record.”

“Not an issue for us, then.”

“I think not, Captain. The planet as a whole is appropriately moderately tectonically active for its age; some volcanism is in progress at the moment. But that activity is far distant from the mining facility—nearly three quarters of the way around the planet. The area around the mining facility has been tectonically quiescent for many centuries.”

John nodded. “One less thing to worry about…”  

The Transporter Room door whooshed open. “Ah, Doctor,” Sh’lok said, “a pleasure to see that once more you’ve managed to overcome your irrational dislike of the Transporter enough to join us. In the long term there may be hope for you yet.”

 _Oh God,_ John thought, ready to roll his eyes but restraining himself, _here we go._

 _“Oi,”_ Dr. Lestrade said, drawing his tall silver-haired self up as he settled his tricorder at his hip, “enough of that from _you,_ Mr. Sh’lok. Don’t mind using the thing to go any normal kind of planetside. But if I’m less than enthusiastic about having my atoms flung into six kilometers of solid rock, that’s _my_ business. Don’t like the idea that maybe some of them might not make it out again.”

“As I’ve told you many times before, It’s not your atoms that are being flung about, Doctor,” Sh’lok said, settling without apparent effort into his side of the waspish dialogue  the two of them had been cultivating with every evidence of (very covert) enjoyment since _Enterprise_ left Earth orbit. “The Transporter effect is merely the creation of equivalent energy states to other atoms elsewhere. The kind of wholesale matter conversion you’re apparently still envisioning despite numerous simple clear explanations would require amounts of energy similar to the output of small stars.“

“Spare me, Sh’lok. I’m a doctor, not a physicist—“

“For which the Interstellar Physics Union’s entire membership daily thank their various deities, I’m sure.“

Lestrade eyed him with matter-of-fact, genial scorn. “—and as for _you_ , sunshine, your grasp of physics may be a wonder to behold, but your chemistry’s not all it’s cracked up to be _this_ week, for sure. Because _I_ saw the almighty _bollocks_ you’d made of OrgChem lab when you’d finished up that clathrate-and-benzene-ring business last week, and frankly it’s a wonder that—”

“Come on now, Doctor,” John said, doing his best to keep his amusement under control. “The _way_ that experiment failed turned out to be vital in solving the situation at Vicus Prime, so we may as well let Mr. Sh’lok off the hook for that one. Let’s just say he got carried away in the heat of the moment.” The joke was hardly a new one now. Endothermy/exothermy issues had been at the heart of the Vicines’ territorial rivalries with their in-system neighbors, and the solution that Sh’lok’s indefatigable experimentation had made possible had caused another commendation from Starfleet, their third since leaving Earth orbit. With those kinds of results ongoing, John was privately quite content to let things keep going just the way they were.  

Sh’lok glanced at his Captain wearing one of those expressions that suggested no one (except maybe _possibly_ sometimes his immediately-superior officer) was allowed to accuse him of getting carried away anywhere. “Well, _I_ call it luck,” Lestrade muttered, getting up onto one of the Transporter pads.

“Which, assuming it actually exists, your species insists inevitably favours the prepared mind,” Sh’lok said. “Therefore there would seem to be little logic in—”

“Gentlemen,” John said, stepping up onto a pad himself and shooting Sh’lok a look—because in some moods he suspected his First Officer would try to outlive God in order to get the last word—“let’s put it on hold for the moment, shall we? The meter’s running.” He glanced over at the Transporter chief. “Mr. Anderson?”

“Ready, sir. The tech on Janus VI says someone’s standing ready to escort  you to the facility supervisor’s office.”

“Excellent. Energize.”

The humming and the sparkling began. As always, John felt his pulse start to quicken… and concentrated on keeping any possible expression of excitement hidden well away inside.

 

* * *

 

Janus VI proved unexpectedly gloomy when the glitter and the hum faded away. John had seen his share of factory and processing facilities that had for one reason or another been hidden away deep under planetary surfaces. Most of them made some sort of stab at reproducing daylight inside the hollowed-out volume where their workers normally had to spend months or years at a time. At the moment, though, just a few high banks of lights shone down through an oppressive blue indoor twilight onto a forest of pipes and conveyors and cracking stacks, all gleaming faintly under the overheads and muttering industrially to themselves—the only sound in that echoing emptiness.

Getting out of what suddenly seemed a rather stifling dark and into the well-lit and climate-controlled environs of the colony Chief Engineer’s office was a relief. Vanderberg was his name: a husky, craggy-faced man with thinning iron-colored hair, wearing a golden but slightly grubby coverall and a weary, harried expression. “Glad to see you at last,” he said in a gravelly voice, greeting John and the others with the rough-edged courtesy of a man who’d spent days being angry and scared. “Be a pleasure to have you people get rid of this damn monster so we can have our lives back and get the hell back into production.”

Somehow John suspected the business wasn’t going to be that straightforward. “All right, let’s assume there’s some kind of monster,” he said. “What has it done? When did it start?”

“About three months ago we opened up a new level,”  Vanderberg said. "Sensors gave us an unusually rich pergium reading. Not only pergium, whatever you want.” He waved around him, an it’s-all-here gesture. “Uranium, sirium, platinum. The whole planet's like that. It's a treasure house.”

John nodded. “We're aware of that. If mining conditions here weren't so difficult, Janus VI could supply the mineral needs of a thousand planets. But what happened?”

“First, the automatic machinery, piece by piece, started to almost disintegrate. Metal began dissolving away. There was no reason for it, and our chemists were unable to analyse the corrosive agent.”

Sh’lok’s expression, to someone who was beginning to learn them, looked unconvinced. “I'm sure there is an answer. It simply has not yet been discovered.”

“Yes it has,” Vanderberg said. “I don't know what this butchering monster is, but I know what it's doing. Our maintenance engineers were sent down to the drifts to repair the corroded machinery. We found them seared to a crisp.”

John glanced at Sh’lok. “You told me there was no volcanic activity in this area…”

“None,” Vanderberg said. “Not for centuries. That’s partly why this facility was built here: we knew it was safe. Doesn’t matter, though. The deaths were down deep at first, but they've been moving up toward our levels. The last man died two days ago, three levels below this.”

“The same way?” John said. “Burned?”

Vanderberg nodded. “I’d like to examine the body,” Lestrade said.

The look Vanderberg threw his way was grim and resigned. “We kept it for you. There isn't much left.. and it isn’t pretty. Roberts here will show you.”

Lestrade and the coverall-clad assistant vanished into a nearby lift. “Do you post sentries?” John said. “Guards?”

“Of course we do.” Vanderberg scowled. “Five of them have died.”

“Who else has seen what killed them?”

“I have,” said a man in a violet coverall as he walked in from another part of the office. He was taller than Vanderberg, with an unruly shock of dark hair.

“This is Ed Appel, our chief processing engineer,” Vanderberg said.

John nodded to him. “Describe it.”

Appel shook his head. “I can’t, not in any detail. Only got a glimpse of it. But it's big and shaggy.”

“Ed shot it,” Vanderberg said.

“You mean shot at it,” Sh’lok said.

“No! I mean shot it,” Appel said, sounding annoyed that his marksmanship was being called into question. “With this.” He unclipped a hand phaser from his belt, displayed it.

“Fascinating,” Sh’lok said, expression and voice quite noncommittal.

“A good clean shot too,” Appel said. “Didn't even slow it down.” He clipped the phaser back in place, his mouth twisting in anger.

“Well, I've made my report to you,” Vanderberg said. “Production’s stopped. Nobody’ll go into the lower levels, and I don't blame them. If the Federation wants pergium, then you're going to have to do something about it.” He glared at John.

“That's why we're here, Mr. Vanderberg,” John said, keeping his tone conciliatory.

Appel sneered at him. “You're all pretty tough, aren't you? Your big starship, your phaser banks… But you can't get your starship down in the tunnels.”

“I don't think we'll need to, Mr. Appel,” John said. “Mr. Vanderberg, we'll need a complete subsurface chart of all the drifts, galleries and tunnels—”

“You’ll get it.” He briefly bent over his desk’s computer console, tapped at it.

Sh’lok had already turned his back on Appel, dismissing him, and in the process of looking around the office, had noticed on Vanderberg’s desk a mauve-colored, pearly-shelled globular object about a third of a meter wide. Sh’lok picked it up, turned it over in his hands. “Mr. Vanderberg, what is this?”

Vanderberg glanced wearily over at it as he straightened up from the computer. “It's a silicon nodule. There are millions of them down there.” He shrugged. “No commercial value.”

Sh’lok’s eyebrows went up as he examined the thing.  “But a geological oddity, to say the least. Pure silicon?”

“A few trace elements.” Vanderberg’s expression went annoyed.  “Look, we didn't call you here so you could collect rocks.”

John’s mouth tightened a little. If there was one thing he’d learned since taking command of _Enterprise_ , it was that his First Officer’s hunches—not that he would normally admit to them, much less dignify them with the name—were worth indulging. _And I won’t have them, or him, disrespected._ “Thank you, Mr. Vanderberg. We'll need your complete co-operation.”

Though John spoke mildly, Vanderberg knew he was being schooled; his eyes narrowed a bit, but he made no more of it than that. “You'll have it. Just find that creature, whatever it is. I've got a quota to meet. Come on, Appel.”

The two of them headed out through the door to the outer office just as Lestrade came out of the lift, looking concerned. John had glanced down at the viewscreen of the computer on Vanderberg’s desk, looking at the basic schematic of the Janus VI facility displaying there: a three-dimensional webwork of drifts, adits, interconnected chambers and galleries. “This huge complex of tunnels isn’t going to make our hunting any easier,” he murmured; then looked up. “Doc?”

Lestrade walked over to look at the schematic with him for a moment. “I looked over the man’s remains,” he said;  ”Schmitter, his name was.” Lestrade blew out a breath. “He didn’t burn to death, Captain. Not in the usual sense, anyway.”

John’s eyebrows went up. “Explain.”

“Well, there are only fragments of bone and teeth left, but the plant's physician agrees with me. The man was killed by chemical corrosion—almost as if he'd been thrown into a vat of extremely corrosive acid.”

John cocked his head at his Chief Medical Officer, not quite sure as yet what to make of this. “Strong enough to eat machinery?”

“Strong enough to eat most things you could think of.”

Sh’lok had stepped in behind Vanderberg’s desk and was touching controls on the computer’s console, changing the focus of the map. “Mr. Sh’lok?” John said.

“I've charted the positions of the deaths and acts of sabotage,” Sh’lok said. “Here, here, and here.” He pointed at the screen as Vanderberg returned to his office. “If the times of these incidents are to be accepted as accurate, the creature would have to have moved at an incredible rate of speed.”

John nodded, turning to Vanderberg. “Mr. Vanderberg, how recent are these charts?”

“Made last year, Captain.”

“Before the appearance of whatever it is?”

“That’s right.”

John turned to his first officer. “Mr. Sh’lok, give us a report on life beneath the surface.”

Sh’lok was examining the readout screen on his tricorder. “Within range of our sensors, there is no life other than the accountable human residents of this colony beneath the surface. At least, no life as we know it.”

John restrained the urge to mutter under his breath, having caught himself hoping that something unexpected was going to magically turn up on Sh’lok’s tricorder. “We don’t have the time to try to cover this place tunnel by tunnel on foot,” he said. “We’ve got to get production going again. We must have that pergium!”

Sh’lok looked thoughtful. “If we could force another appearance of this creature—”

Vanderberg looked at the Vulcan as if he’d taken leave of his senses. “When that creature appears, men die!”

And horribly on cue, a high urgent alarm note started sounding somewhere out in the huge artificial cavern that housed the bulk of the pergium processing facility. “Oh God, _no—!”_ Vanderberg said, and was out the door a second later.

John and Sh’lok and Lestrade went after him at speed. They followed him out into the cavern and pounded their way across the great echoing space, dodging in among the cracking columns and out again, toward one largish circular structure that stood to one side of the main compound near a number of entries to the tunnel complex. “The power plant—” Vanderberg panted as they caught up with him near the building.

Ahead of them a small crowd of men in worksuits was gathering, the beams of portable torches dancing hectically from their hands and flashing toward and away from one spot on the ground. John and Sh’lok slowed, seeing it, but Lestrade trotted straight toward it and dropped to his knees there, tricorder out.

What he was examining was less the remains of a man than a place where a man had fallen while still apparently in the act of dissolving. Wisps of acrid smoke were rising still from the human-shaped stain on the hard smooth rock of the cavern floor. Nearby, the power plant door that the man had been guarding had had a neat circular hole eaten straight through it.

John looked around him and saw nothing anywhere but upset and angry humans, and opening after opening into the dark cavern walls. “Too many tunnels,” he said, “we couldn’t possibly—” He turned. “Mr. Sh’lok, our sensors can pick up normal life functions at a considerable distance… but what about _abnormal_ life functions?”

Sh’lok was just opening his mouth to answer when above them the lights hanging from the ceiling of the cavern flickered. In a place of such oppressive dimness, the effect commanded instant attention: the thought of the dark that would fall when those lights went out was unnerving. Another alarm started going off, but for John at least it was entirely superfluous.

“Something’s happening in the reactor room!” Vanderberg shouted, and went through the hole in the door. Fascinated by the clean sharp edge of the cut-through, John lifted a hand toward it, but paused when Sh’lok reached out with his phaser hand to stop him. 

“I wouldn't touch it, Captain. An extremely active corrosive. Traces may linger.”

Looking at it, John nodded: he could see the edges still sizzling faintly. With care he stepped through.

“Watson, quickly!” Vanderberg’s voice came back to him. Hurriedly John made his way along the power plant’s corridor, drawing his phaser as he went.

The reactor room was full of antiquated-looking control consoles and a central column that had had another of those large holes melted into it, this one far less regular than all the others—but straight through three layers of armor plate. Vanderberg was peering into the hole and swearing: he stood up as John and Sh’lok joined him.

“The main circulating pump for the entire reactor is gone,” Vanderberg said.

Sh’lok spent a moment examining the edges of the hole. “The same indication as shown at the door, Captain. A very strong corrosive, secreted with great precision.”

John shook his head, looking over to Vanderberg. “Is there a replacement for that?”

“No, none,” the man said, sounding like this was the last thing he needed, the straw that would break his back if no camel could be found. “It’s outdated, but we never had any trouble with it.”

“Sh’lok,” John said, “anything on board—?”

Sh’lok gave his Captain a look as if John had asked him for the Eta Cancri Carbuncle, or perhaps the Holy Grail. “Nothing for a device _this_ antiquated, Captain.”

Vanderberg rubbed his face in distress. “Without the pump mechanism, the reactor will go supercritical. It could poison half the planet when it blows. But we can't shut it down! It provides heat and air and life support for the whole colony…”

John looked sidelong at his First Officer as the two of them turned away to consider their options. “Mr. Sh’lok, we seem to have been given a choice. Death by asphyxiation or death by radiation poisoning…”


	3. ACT TWO

Minutes later John was standing there trying to disguise his frustration as he listened to the (familiar-enough) sound of his Chief Engineer trying to keep from laughing at yet another impossible thing he’d asked her to do. “A PXK _pergium reactor_ pump?” Mrs. Hudson said. “Not at all, sir! We don't have any spare circulating pump for a thing like _that_. I haven't even _seen_ a PXK in twenty years.”

John’s mouth tightened in exasperation. “Can you rig one up? It's vital.”

“Well, sir,” Hudson said, sounding dubious, “I can throw together some odds and ends, but it won't hold for long. Forty-eight hours maybe, with a bit of luck.”

John sighed. “Forty-eight hours is better than nothing. Gather what you need and beam down here with it. Top priority.”

“Of course, Captain. I'll be right down. Hudson out.”

He snapped the communicator shut and put it away, turning back to Vanderberg. The man didn’t look even slightly reassured. “What happens when it breaks down?”

“Hopefully we'll have found the missing part by then.”

Vanderberg scowled. “’Hopefully.’ Small chance!”

“We'll _have_ to hope we find it, Chief. The alternative is to evacuate all you people up to the _Enterprise_.” John shook his head. “A dozen planets depend on you for pergium for their reactors. They're already screaming. Reactors are closing down, life support systems…”

“I'm concerned with my people right here, Watson. They're being murdered. You find that monster and kill it!”

It wasn’t as if he didn’t understand the concept. Shortly now he was going to have to order his own people into harm’s way. Not that John wasn’t willing enough to be in such a situation by his own choice, or on his superiors’ orders. But when it was _his_ people—

John let out a breath and left to get on with it.

 

* * *

 

In Vanderberg’s office some bare-bones refreshments had been laid out—vacuum jugs of various hot and cold beverages. Dr. Lestrade was already having a cup of the miners’ idea of coffee. John thought it safer to stick to tea, and poured himself some to help him pull his thoughts together.

Sh’lok, as usual, was not eating or drinking while on mission (John thought yet again with some amusement of having heard the Vulcan turn down even water, saying “It slows me down”). He was on his feet, arms folded, worrying away at the problem facing them.

“The missing pump wasn't taken by accident,” he was saying. “It was the one piece of equipment absolutely essential for the operation of the reactor.”

That had occurred to John as well: it was too crucial a move to be mistaken for coincidence. “Do you think the creature is trying to push the colonists off the planet?”

“It would seem so.”

“But why now, Mr. Sh’lok? These production facilities have been in operation for over fifty years.”

“I don't know.” John let that sink in. It wasn’t often the Vulcan made such statements in the clear. Yet he also noted Sh’lok’s very slight quirk of an eyebrow, and his glance at the desk. “But there is a possibility…”

He walked very slowly over toward the desk, arms still folded.

“What's that?” John said.

Sh’lok gazed down for a moment at the silicon nodule on its little stand, and then tilted his head up again, looking off into some distance. “Life as we know it,” he said slowly, “is universally based on some combination of carbon compounds.” He turned away, came back toward John and Lestrade. “But what if life exists based on another element? For instance, silicon.”

Lestrade’s reaction was the kind of amusement that might have followed the Science Officer starting to recite some fairy tale. “You're creating fantasies, Mr. Sh’lok.”

Sh’lok didn’t react to that: just tilted his head, waiting to see John’s reaction.

John glanced at Lestrade, shook his head. “Not necessarily, Bones. I've heard of the theoretical possibility of life based on silicon…” He regarded Sh’lok. “But silicon-based life would be of an _entirely_ different order. It's possible that our phasers might not affect it.”

“Certainly not phaser one,” Sh’lok said, “which is far less powerful than phaser two.”

The idea was intriguing. John began to pace a bit. “All right, how about this? A creature that lives deep in the planet below us, at home in solid rock. It seems to me that in order to survive, it would have to have some form of natural armour plating. Just to protect it from the natural stresses it would have to deal with. The heat of the depths, the pressure…”

“It could explain much, especially since the colonists are armed only with phaser one.”

“But our people have phaser number two—” John said.

“Which I could adjust to be more effective against silicon.”

Lestrade was looking dubiously at the two of them. “You’re both missing something. Even if it was physiologically possible, silicon-based life wouldn’t be able to exist in an oxygen atmosphere!”

Sh’lok moved over toward the desk again to gaze down at the silicon nodule. “It may be, Doctor, that the creature can exist for brief periods in such an atmosphere before returning to its own environment…”

Lestrade snorted genially. “Still think you're imagining things.”

“You may be right, Doctor, but at least it's something to go on.” _And at this point, anything’s better than nothing…_ “Mr. Sh’lok, have Lieutenant Commander Giotto assemble a security detail and arm them with phaser number two. You make the proper adjustments.”

The Vulcan nodded, his attention still bent on the nodule. John finished his tea and wandered over to look at it himself… by way of an excuse to look more closely at his First Officer. “You seem fascinated by this rock,” John said after a moment.

“Yes, Captain.” Sh’lok reached out to pick up the nodule again, once more turning it over and over in his hands as he scrutinized it. “You recall that Vanderberg commented there were thousands of these at a lower level. The level which the machinery opened just prior to the first appearance of the creature…”

“Do they tie in?”

“I don't know.” To John’s slight surprise, Sh’lok again said this without the usual intonation suggesting that such an admission pained him. He threw a glance at Lestrade, though, as if looking for a reaction. 

“Speculate,” John said.

Lestrade came closer, looking at Sh’lok with interest, but just also just a trace of mockery, which Sh’lok instantly noted. His face closed over. “I dislike speculating with inadequate data, Captain,” Sh’lok said. “It biases the judgment.” And he glanced sidewise at the Doctor. “Besides, I have already given Dr. Lestrade sufficient cause for amusement. I'd prefer to cogitate the possibilities for a time.”

John straightened. “A short time, Mr. Sh’lok. We have very little…”

 

* * *

 

He left them to it and headed back over to the facility’s reactor room. Mrs. Hudson had wasted no time. With one of her Engineering staff she was kneeling beside a complicated, unquestionably cobbled-together contraption of cylinders and tubes and solid power sources—something that looked like its image should appear in an engineering reference next to the definition for “jury-rigged”. “How’s it going, Hudders?”

He already had reason to strongly suspect what the answer would be by the way she’d been tutting at the thing under her breath when he came in. Now Hudson gave the rig the kind of half-despairing look with which she routinely favored any installation that wasn’t a model of tidiness and good order. “It's a plumber's nightmare, but it'll hold for a bit.”

“It has to hold longer than a bit,” John said.

Mrs. Hudson shook her head. “Sorry, Captain. That's about the best I can do. But I doubt it’ll be good enough.”

His communicator chirped. John flipped it open. “Watson here.”

“Captain,” Mr. Sh’lok said, “the security officers have gathered in Chief Vanderberg's office.”

“I'll be right there. Watson out.” He glanced down at Mrs. Hudson, who looked increasingly irritated at the thing she and her assistant were building. All John could do was try to communicate that her reputation as a miracle-worker was safe as far as he was concerned. “Hudders,” he said, patting her shoulder, “ride herd on it. Kind words. Tender loving care. Kiss it, baby it… bake it scones if you have to. But keep it going as long as you can.”

“I'll do what I can, sir.” But the look she threw at him made it plain that wasn’t going to be much.

 

* * *

 

A party of six red-shirted security staff was lined up in the office, waiting for John. Sh’lok and Vanderberg stood to one side as John game them their orders.

“You’ll proceed from level to level, checking out every meter of tunnel,  every opening. You are searching for some sort of creature which is highly resistant to phaser fire. Phasers will be set on maximum.” He looked from face to face, intent. “And remember this. Fifty people have already died. I want no more deaths.”

“Except the bloody _thing,”_ Vanderberg growled.

“The creature may or may not attack on sight,” John said. “However, _you_ must. It is vitally important we get this installation back into production.”

Mr. Sh’lok turned to the facility chief. “Mr. Vanderberg, may I ask at which level you discovered the nodules of silicon?”

“The twenty-third. Why?”

Sh’lok turned and glanced at John. “Commander Giotto,” John said to the tall greying security chief, “take your detail and go directly to the twenty-third level. Start your search there.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Giotto said. “May I ask if you have reason to suspect this creature may be on that level?”

“It's one of the possibilities we've discussed.” John turned to Vanderberg. “I want your people to stay on the top level together, at a safe place.”

Vanderberg looked annoyed. “I don't know any safe place, Captain, the way that thing comes and goes…”

“Well, gentlemen, you have your instructions. Let's get at it.”

The security team filed out. Watching them go, John found it impossible to ignore the way Vanderberg looked after them with uneasy resignation, as if asking himself how many of them he wouldn’t see alive again.

That old familiar shiver went down John’s spine again: but not for his own sake, and there was nothing pleasant about it.

 

* * *

 

The Security team started to fan out into the tunnels, and John watched them go, then went after them in company with Sh’lok.

The tunnels’ walls were fairly rough-hewn, but the floors had in most places been machined quite smooth, probably to ease the passage of other equipment—though there were places where stones still protruded: hard chunks of minerals apparently too hard for the machinery to deal with. Here and there occasional pieces of equipment lay propped against the walls or left on the floor… possibly in the miners’ haste to get out of the tunnels once they’d been told they didn’t have to stay any longer, that help was on its way.

John walked as quietly as he could, listening hard for any indication of something approaching them. _Something ‘big and shaggy.’ What does that even sound like?_ Other people had been listening hard for days, and had been swiftly and horribly killed anyway—

Sh’lok had paused by one tunnel wall, his tricorder warbling softly. John moved back to him. “Mr. Sh’lok? Find something?”

“Adjusting my tricorder to register for silicon, Captain.” The Vulcan paused, examining the device’s readout. “Interesting.”

“Traces?”

“A life form, Captain. Bearing one hundred eleven degrees, elevation four degrees.”

“One of our people?”

Sh’lok looked over his shoulder at John, a grim but satisfied gleam in his eye. “No, sir. Silicon.”

John knew that though in theory Vulcans were supposed to be above such sentiments as enjoyment, there were few things Sh’lok enjoyed more than being right. He just hoped that the rightness didn’t mean they were presently enjoying the last few minutes of their lives. “Come on.”

Together they ducked to negotiate another of the lower tunnel openings in the general direction Sh’lok had noted, and moved side by side into the darkness.

It was probably at least a few minutes later, but seemed like just a few breaths’ time, before John heard the sound he’d been dreading: a long hoarse cry of anguish, quickly cut off. _And no sound of phasers right after,_ John thought. _Somebody got separated, went off on his own, got lost— Damn it all!_ “Sh’lok—”

“This way, Captain!”

They ran. Moments later they came to the spot where the crewman had fallen. _Literally a spot,_ John thought, looking down at the dark, smoking patch on the floor and feeling something else he’d had cause to feel too many times since he’d taken command of _Enterprise_ : the quick sick flip of the stomach on discovering that someone following his orders had died of it.

Sh’lok knelt down beside what was left of the crewman— _not even enough left of him to tell who it was right away, oh_ God _I hate this!—_ and dispassionately picked up his phaser. “He never even had time to fire, Captain.”

John glanced around them. “It's only been seconds since we heard him scream. The creature must still be nearby.”

Sh’lok moved on down the tunnel, leaving his Captain by himself for a moment—though not out of sight. John knelt down just briefly over what was left of his crewman, thinking about the message he was going to have to send back to this man’s family. And in the background another thought moved briefly, not quite spelling itself out, but present: _Vulcan or not, he knows me well enough to know I need this. Even if just for a second or so…_

“Captain.”

John got up and headed down the tunnel to join Sh’lok. He was standing by another tunnel that met theirs. This one was nothing like the ones they’d been walking through until now. It was lower than most, perfectly circular, its sides nearly perfectly smooth—enough to gleam where they reflected the tunnels’ dim light.

“This tunnel,” Sh’lok said. “My readings indicate it was made within the hour. Moments ago, in fact.”

“Are you certain?”

“Positive.”

John looked down the length of it: a perfect tube cut in the stone, converging what must be hundreds of meters away in a pinhead of vanishing point. “This goes back as far as the eye can see!” he said. “Our best machinery couldn't cut a tunnel like this, not even with phasers.”

“Indeed, Captain. I'm quite at a loss.” But again he couldn’t hide ( _or wouldn’t?,_ John thought: something to examine in more detail some other time) that glint of excitement at something not understood, a mystery—

A sudden heavy throbbing sound behind them, pulsing like a heartbeat,  knocked that thought right off its rails. This time the adrenaline was no mere shiver but the real thing, a flare of urgent heat that pulsed from the small of John’s back outwards as he turned. Sh’lok was a fraction of a second ahead of him in spinning toward the sound, phaser up— 

 _Big and shaggy,_ John thought, finding nothing particularly funny about the description now that he was face to face with the reality of it. In a cloud of acid-reeking fumes, something knobbly and dome-shaped and easily a meter tall slid right at the two of them out of what had been solid stone a moment before, and then stopped still, almost as if surprised.

For an eternal-seeming second John and Sh’lok both stood frozen, staring at the new arrival. It was fringy around the edges and quite big enough, maybe a meter and a half across. If John had previously given any thought to what colour the Cave Monster might be, his ideas would probably have had something to do with the dark blue-shaded stone all around them. But the Cave Monster apparently preferred the other end of the spectrum. It was lumpily adorned in shades of red and yellow as bright as lava, the uneven veins of texture and colour irregularly broken by darker, pulsing patches that glittered even in this dimness.

The thing’s momentary hesitation confused John for a moment. _Except before now it’s always picked its victims off one by one, hasn’t it? Could this be the first time it’s met two people together?_ But then it moved again, shuffling toward them, and John immediately fired, training the phaser’s beam on a spot near the creature’s front end and rightward flank. A second later Sh'lok's beam was hitting the same spot, holding there— 

The creature shuddered and flinched away from the phaser fire, shuffled back the way it had come in a flurry of fringes, and dove into the tunnel behind it at amazing speed. John and Sh’lok ran after it, but weren’t in time to see much more but a cloud of fumes—and when that cleared, nothing but another of those tunnels that went on and on, this one now as empty as the one they’d been examining moments before.

Together they crouched near the tunnel’s end, gazing down its length. “Gone,” John murmured.

“Disappeared,” Sh’lok said. “Astonishing that anything of that bulk could move so rapidly.”

Even from where he crouched, John could feel the scorch radiating off the stone. “These walls, they’re hot—”

“Indeed. This tunnel was cut within the last two minutes.”

The sound of footsteps brought John to his feet again. Moments later Giotto and another of his security team arrived. “Are you all right, Captain?” Giotto said, breathless.

“Yes, perfectly.”

“Did you see it, sir?”

 _And lived to tell the tale,_ John thought, _unlike some._ “Yes, we saw it.” He turned to Sh’lok, who was on his feet again. “Where does the tunnel go?”

“Readings indicate a maze of tunnels of this general category in that direction,” Sh’lok said, waving at the wall through which the tunnel had been driven.

“Did you get a shot at it?” Giotto said.

“Yes,” John said, glancing at something on the floor that he and Sh’lok had passed while chasing the creature it had fallen off of. “We took a bite out of it.”

Sh’lok bent down without hesitation to pick up the object, and John immediately had reason to recall those various awards for valour that his First Officer had accumulated and declared “dull”. But however their quarry secreted its acid, there seemed to be none of it on the slab of stuff it had left behind, and Sh’lok examined it curiously. It was light in his hands, and hard like a shell around the edges; but more central parts of it, the crystal-encrusted darker patches, were still pulsing, and glittering as they pulsed.  

“It's not animal tissue,” John said. “What is it?”

Sh’lok was running one hand thoughtfully over it. “The closest approximation I could come to would be something like fibrous asbestos. A mineral, Captain.”

“Then your guess was right,” John said.

“I never guess,” said Sh’lok. John, glancing up, had no intention of contradicting his First Officer in front of their men, but he gave Sh’lok a look intended to say quite clearly, _Yes you do._

“But it would seem so,” Sh’lok went on, as if he hadn’t seen the look at all. “Silicon-based.”

“Summation,” John said.

“We are dealing with a silicon creature of the deep rocks,” Sh’lok said, “capable of moving through solid rock as easily as we move through the air.”

“That would account for the tunnels…”

“As we’ve seen. This creature's body secretes an extremely powerful corrosive—”

“Easily powerful enough to dissolve the door of the reactor chamber,” John said.

“And to do the same to the murdered men.”

John nodded, turning toward Giotto and his teammate. “It's definitely phaser resistant,” he said. “We had our weapons adjusted for silicon and on full power, yet we only damaged it.” He looked toward that empty tunnel. “It still lives.”

Giotto looked unhappy. “You mean it's impossible to kill?”

“No,” John said. “But it might require massed phasers.”

“Or a single phaser,” Sh’lok said, “with much longer contact.”

John walked over to the new tunnel’s entrance again, crouched down by it again and gazed down it. “Commander, pass this on to your men. We knew it was a killer. Now it's wounded, probably in pain somewhere back there.” John drew an uneasy breath, wondering how much worse he and Sh’lok might just have made things. “And there's nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal…”


	4. ACT THREE

 John sent Giotto and his crewman off to brief and redirect the rest of the security team, warning them that the creature now on the run was in this sector of the mining facility and was wounded. “And Giotto,” John said as they turned to go. “The man who died in the tunnel here— See that his personal info file is on my desk when we get back up to the ship.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Sh’lok was standing in the middle of the space where the creature had faced them down, intent on his tricorder. John headed over to him. “What is it, Mr. Sh’lok?”

“I've run a complete spherical check on all life forms,” Sh’lok said, “to a hundred miles out. I've located our men, all of them, and I've located one creature moving rapidly through native rock, bearing two hundred and one.” He paused. “And that is all.”

 _“One_ creature in a hundred miles?” John said.

“Excellent, Captain, you follow,” Sh’lok said. “There are literally thousands of these tunnels in this general area alone… far too many to be cut by the one creature even if it has quite a long lifetime.”

 “Then we're dealing with more than one creature, despite your tricorder readings,” John said. “Or we have a creature with an extremely long life span.”

 _“Or,”_ Sh’lok said, “it is the _last_ of a race of creatures which made these tunnels. If so—if it is the only survivor of a dead race—to kill it would be a crime against science.”

John held his peace for a moment. His First Officer held himself proudly aloof from issues of “mere belief”. But if there was anything he worshipped as others worshipped their gods, it was Science—and _that_ he venerated with his whole heart and soul. Sh’lok’s face was immobile enough, but his eyes were locked on John’s, willing him to understand.

John had to turn and take a few steps away to break the intensity of it… not least because the gods demanding _his_ obedience right this moment were Duty and its inevitable companion Pragmatism. “Mr. Sh’lok,” John said after a moment. “Our mission is to protect this colony.” Purposely he let his tone go harsh. “And get the pergium moving again. This is not a zoological expedition.”

The silence that had fallen behind him acquired a sorrowful tone as it lengthened out and no argument came. John relented a little and said more quietly, “Maintain a constant reading on the creature. If we have to, we'll use phasers to cut our own tunnels. We'll try to surround it.” _Though at the speed that creature moves—what are the odds? This is a chessboard with way too many levels. And our adversary’s going to have no trouble outmaneuvering us if we try playing a defensive game…_

Quietly Sh’lok had moved back to his side: a gesture of acquiescence. “I'm sorry, Mr. Sh’lok,” John said, still not turning to meet his eyes, “but I'm afraid the creature must die.”

“I see no alternative myself, Captain,” Sh’lok said; and though his tone was even, an educated ear could hear the sorrow in it. “It merely seems a pity.”

John nodded.

Sh’lok glanced back the way they had originally come. “The search team is gathering in the main tunnel.”

“Good,” John said. Together they turned and headed for the meeting point.

 

* * *

 

Giotto stood at the head of a line of seven more security men, all standing with readjusted phasers braced over their forearms while John moved down the line, gauging their alertness, making sure to catch each one’s eye as he spoke. “So the creature’s wounded,” he said, “and therefore twice as dangerous. Make sure you stay in pairs. If you see it, concentrate your phaser fire at what appears to be its head. Concentrate it. Maintain it. It is definitely resistant, but it can be hurt. And if it can be hurt, it can be killed.”

He turned to his First Officer. “Mr. Sh’lok—”

“Gentlemen,” Sh’lok said, “if you'll examine your charts, please— I last located the creature in the area marked Adit Two Six, moving along bearing two zero one. This particular group will move out beyond that area in all directions in an effort to surround it, and possibly capture it.”

John shot Sh’lok a glance, as did one or two of the security men. John didn’t comment: merely said, “Your orders are shoot to kill. Protect yourself at all times.” He turned to Giotto. “Commander Giotto, disperse your search parties.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”  He waved at his people. “Louis, Vinci, take your men out.”

The two groups departed. John paused in the middle of the tunnel with his back to his First Officer, hands behind his back, not quite at parade rest but close: a stance that Sh’lok should be able to read quite well by now as the sign of a slightly annoyed Captain.

“Mr. Sh’lok,” John said. Sh’lok came up to stand beside him; John turned his head and gave him a look. “’Capture it?’ I don't recall giving any such order.”

“You did not, sir. I merely thought that if the opportunity arose—”

“I will lose no more men,” John said. “The creature will be killed on sight, and that's the end of it.”

There was the slightest pause, as if Sh’lok had been hoping for a change of heart. “Very well, sir,” he said then.

Without warning an image flashed through John’s mind of Sh’lok all by himself in some tunnel, lured away by that ridiculous curiosity of his, or this impulse of compassion (deny it though he would) for a creature all alone, the last of its kind; or both of them together. Sh’lok not actually directly _disobeying_ an order, oh of course not, because a Vulcan wouldn’t do such a thing. But regardless, an unguarded moment, too much attention on investigation, on discovery, on Science— And then Sh’lok left as nothing but a smoking stain on one of these cold stone floors, that remarkable intelligence and unique personality irrevocably lost to Starfleet, to the _Enterprise_ , to—

“Mr. Sh’lok,” John said. “I want you to assist Hudders in maintaining that makeshift circulating pump.”

Sh’lok looked at his Captain with the expression of someone convinced that their hearing had failed them for a moment, because what they’d just thought they’d heard made no sense whatsoever. “I— I beg your pardon, sir?”

He’d actually _stammered_. John felt a flush of guilt, but quashed it ruthlessly: what he had in mind was for the best. “You heard me. It's vital that we keep that reactor in operation. Your scientific knowledge—”

There were situations in which flattery sometimes worked a bit with Sh’lok, but apparently this was not going to be one of them. In fact his expression changed sufficiently to indicate that someone might have said something slightly offensive: _inadvertently_ , perhaps, but still— “Is not needed _there_ , sir. Mrs. Hudson has far more knowledge of nuclear reactors than I do. You're aware of that.”

 _Damn. Overplayed it. He not only admitted that someone else knew more about something than he did, but he said it as if it was a_ good _thing. …Okay, let’s try another tack. Logic._ “Mr. Sh’lok,” John said, “you are second in command. This will be a dangerous hunt. Either one of us by himself is expendable. Both of us are not.”

Sh’lok didn’t even blink. “Captain, there are approximately one hundred of us engaged in this search, against one creature. The odds against you and I _both_ being killed—” He actually paused for effect. “Are two thousand, two hundred twenty-eight… to one.”

That gaze was locked on his again. “Two thousand, two hundred twenty-eight…” John said. “To one.”

Sh’lok gazed at him steadily, seriously, waiting.

John couldn’t hold it for more than a few seconds: just _couldn’t._ He had to let about half a half-smile out for Sh’lok to see. “…Those are pretty good odds, Mr. Sh’lok.”

“And they are of course accurate, Captain.”

”Of course.” John eyed the Vulcan. _Outplayed. Effortlessly._ “Well, I hate to use the word, but logically, with those kind of odds, you might as well stay. But please… stay out of trouble, Mr. Sh’lok.”

This time there was no mistaking the expression of being ever so slightly put out by someone’s failure to grasp the obvious. “That is always my intention, Captain.”

 _I will not laugh, I will_ not _laugh…_ The beep of John’s communicator saved him. He flipped it open. “Watson here.”

“Hudson here, Captain.” She sounded extremely unhappy. “My brilliant improvisation just gave up the ghost. It couldn't stand the strain.”

 _Oh God._ “Can you fix it again?”

“I’m so sorry, John. It's gone for good.”

 _Shit._ Hudders preferred to keep her conversation jauntily formal when things were going well, but when she saw trouble coming, first names slipped out: and when she slipped so far as to call him “dear” he knew that disaster was imminent. _At least we’re not there quite yet_. “Very well. Start immediate evacuation of all colonists to the _Enterprise_.”

From somewhere near her, Vanderberg spoke up. “Not all of them, Captain. I and some of my key personnel are staying. We'll be down to join you.”

“We haven't enough phaser-two adjusted weapons for you,” John said.

“Then we'll use clubs! We're not being chased away from here. We're staying.”

There was no point wasting time in arguing with such persistent pugnacity. “Very well. Get everybody else aboard the _Enterprise._ The fewer people we have breathing the air down here, the longer the rest of us will be able to hold out. How much longer, Hudders?”

“The reactor will go super-critical in about ten hours, sir. You’ve that long to find the mechanism.”

John nodded. “We'll do our best. Start feeding me and the ship constant status reports, Hudders. Vanderberg, you and your crew assemble at level twenty three, checkpoint Tiger. Watson out.”

He gathered up Sh’lok with a glance, and side by side they headed off to rendezvous with the others.

 

* * *

 

It had to be John’s imagination that the air around them was getting hotter, stuffier. _Not possible… at least not yet._ But there was always the possibility that the reactor, already well along in the process of going supercritical, might decide to get ahead of itself and make a fool of his Chief Engineer… not to mention all the rest of them. _It’ll poison half the planet,_ Vanderberg had said. _But not before it melts_ this _bit of it to superheated slag and blows everything else for kilometers around sky-high…_

The predictable adrenaline-fueled shiver went down his back, but he had no time for it now. Vanderberg and the half-dozen or so of the mining facility’s people who’d elected to stay behind after the general evacuation were gathering around him now, waiting for orders.

“Right,” John said when he was clear that everyone they’d been waiting for was here. “Team up with the _Enterprise_ security personnel—they're better armed than you. Keep someone in sight at all times.” He turned to the Janus VI facility chief. “Vanderberg, take two men. Go through that tunnel there.” John pointed. “Rendezvous with Commander Giotto and his security detail. Mr. Appel, and the rest of you men, go through there—” He indicated a different tunnel. “Link up with Lieutenant Osborne's group. Mr. Sh’lok and I will control the operation from a central point. That's all.”

Off the miners went in their various directions, leaving the Captain and Sh’lok alone in the dim corridor. John turned to his First Officer and saw him looking unusually still and intense: listening. “Mr. Sh’lok?

“Captain,” Sh’lok said softly, “we are being watched.”

John glanced around. “Are you sure?” he murmured. “Intuition?” _Because who knows what senses he’s got that he doesn’t think to tell us about? Or know how to? Might as well call it that…_

Sh’lok shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. “We’re being watched.”

When a Vulcan said something so nakedly declaratory, there was no option to take it as anything but a fact. Together they started to make their way down the tunnel in which they stood.

Sh’lok had activated his tricorder and was checking it every fifty paces or so. After a few minutes he paused, several meters away from a spot in which their own tunnel forked. “Captain,” he said, “fresh readings within the hour.” He gestured right and left with his phaser. “In each of these tunnels.”

John nodded. “The chart says both of these tunnels converge a few thousand yards further. I’ll take the left. You take the right.”

“Should we separate?” Sh’lok said.

John gave him a resigned sort of _Do we have a choice?_ look. “Two tunnels,” he said, “two of us…” He shrugged. “We separate.”

And John started down the left-hand tunnel. As he went he noted without comment the Vulcan’s briefly raised eyebrow, and walked steadily on as if he couldn’t hear that Sh’lok, watching him, didn’t move until John’s tunnel curved enough that he could no longer be seen. 

His tunnel was one that had been cut by the miners through the softly glittering cobalt-shaded stone that characterized this part of the facility. Fairly quickly the miners’ work terminated in what would have been a dead end, but the tunnel continued onward along the same line in the form of one of the uncannily-perfect cylindrical tunnels that were also all through here. It was low, no more than a meter and a half high, and John had to get down and make his way along half-bent over.

Shortly, though, that tunnel came out into a wider space that looked like a small cavern or cavelet that natural forces had produced in the stone—one that showed few signs of the miners’ tools, with only an occasional piece of equipment discarded on the relatively smooth floor.

John straightened up again and moved cautiously into the space, looking around. His eye immediately fell on quite a few things that had nothing to do with the miners. He paused, pulled out his communicator; the chirp of it echoed. “Mr. Sh’lok—”

The reply was immediate. “Yes, Captain.”

“I’ve found a whole layer of these silicon nodules of yours,” John said, moving in among them. “Hundreds of them.” They lay scattered around the floor, some perched up on ledges, others piled up against the walls. John was intrigued by the variations in their colours; they weren’t all the soft mauve of the one in Vanderberg’s office, but ranged from pale pearly-white or dove-grey shades through deeper hues of rose or gold or soft blue.

“Indeed?” Sh’lok said. “I find that most illuminating, Captain. Be absolutely certain you do not damage any of them.”

 _He keeps saying things like that. And then not saying_ why. But John had been learning that this was one of Sh’lok’s quirks. Sometimes from uncertainty, sometimes from what looked like a secret pleasure in others’ reactions, he would do everything he could to present a theory in its entirety rather than in half-assembled scraps. _Right now, though, even scraps would be welcome!_ “Explain.”

“Only a theory I have—” Sh’lok said.

John was in the act of rolling his eyes (because by now he knew the sound of his rather unVulcan Vulcan getting ready to stonewall him again)  when his gaze caught something it might not have otherwise—something moving, something in the shadows of the cavern; and then something else tall and massive that was pitching toward him. Instantly John flung himself backwards out of its way, rolling aside as he did to avoid a few of the silicon nodules that he might have fallen on otherwise.

Not far from him, though, at the far side of the cavern things came down— one of the rough pillars that had supported that side of the low roof, toppling sideways and dislodging more chunks of rock from the walls nearby as it fell. Stones and rubble crashed and scattered deafeningly all around. Dust flew up in clouds.

“Captain,” said Sh’lok’s voice from the communicator, alarmed. “Are you all right?” And then, much more urgently: “John? _John!”_

Silence…

It took a few moments for John to realize his ears were ringing, and then some moments more before he could hear through it, and hear the voice calling his name again and again over the communicator.

“Yes, Mr. Sh’lok, all right,” he said as he got to his feet and stared around him. “We… seem to have had a cave-in.” He coughed once or twice; rock dust was still floating in the air.

“I could phaser you out!” Sh’lok said, the timbre of his voice higher than usual. John lifted an eyebrow at the sound. It was odd and a bit unsettling to hear that deep steady baritone change register and go so raw around the edges.

“No, you’d better not,” John said. “Any disturbance might bring down the rest of the wall.” He glanced around to check whether the tunnel he was planning to continue through was blocked at all; it wasn’t. “Besides, it isn't necessary. The chart said the tunnels meet further on.”

There was a pause. “Very well,” Sh’lok said, his voice steadying down into its more normal depths, though there was still an edge to it. “But I find it extremely disquieting that your roof chose that particular moment to collapse. Please proceed with extreme caution. I shall quicken my pace.”

“Very well, Mr. Sh’lok, I'll meet you at the other end—”

The rushing noise off to one side wasn’t what he’d been listening for, but it instantly got John’s attention. He watched in astonishment as across from him a wide patch of the rough-hewn tunnel wall glowed red-hot, flared for a moment into a perfect circle of brief fierce flame, and then simply vanished away in a cloud of combusting fumes. Through the circular opening, ponderous but unnervingly quick, a rough-domed shape patched in lava-red and fire-yellow and darker stony shades came rumbling forward to pause a couple of meters away from John, shuffling a bit from side to side as if nerving itself to charge.

The shiver down his back was there in spades, but there wasn’t much to choose between fight and flight at the moment. If he tried to run, it would catch him. If he fired, his weapon might not be enough. _And here I am by myself,_ John thought, _alone. The way almost all the others were when they died…_

 


	5. ACT FOUR

For long moments, unmoving, they looked at each other—assuming the term “looked” had any meaning in this context. John stood there with his phaser raised, ready to act, his blood singing with the danger of the moment. The creature meanwhile held its ground, neither advancing or retreating, as if sizing him up—

Experimentally John slowly lowered his phaser a bit. Immediately the creature shuffled forward—but not too quickly, not too closely. He lifted it again and immediately the creature stopped. Then after a second it shuffled backward again to its original position.

Once more John let the hand holding his phaser drop a little toward his side, more slowly. After a second, once again the creature rumbled half a meter or so toward him. Quickly John raised the weapon again, and immediately the creature shuffled itself back to where it had been. There it stood—or lay, or crouched, who knew—plainly watching him, however it was doing that.

 _Can it see?_ John thought. _Does it even need to? What use would sight be to a creature that lives its life completely surrounded by stone and darkness? If not sight, what kind of senses of perception_ does _it have?_ That was merely the top layer of questions, glittering like sunlight on the surface of the liquid rush of underlying danger. This was the very paradigm of what had taken John into Starfleet and out to space: new life. And risk, yes: but that was the price you paid for going out to meet the unknown. And in a situation like this, John paid it willingly, because it was _amazing_.

_Assuming this thing doesn’t kill me, of course—_

Off to John’s left, another tunnel debouched into the little cavern. Experimentally, again, he made a move toward it. This time the creature moved immediately, matching his sideways move as if to prevent him leaving.

His communicator beeped. He reached for it, flipped it open, phaser still raised and trained on the watching creature. “Watson here.”

“Captain,” Sh’lok said. “I’ve just read some fresh signs. The creature is in this area. I'll take a lifeform reading—”

“Not necessary, Mr. Sh’lok,” John said. “I know exactly where the creature is.”

The reply had an unnerved sound to it. “Where, Captain?”

John raised his eyebrows in resignation, almost amused. “Ten feet away from me.”

Immediate alarm. “Kill it, Captain, quickly!”

“It's not making any threatening moves, Sh’lok.”

“You don't dare take the chance, Captain. _Kill it!”_

Even in this situation John had no compunction about teasing his First Officer a little, and using his own contradictions was the best way to do it. “I thought you were the one who wanted it kept alive. Captured, if possible.”

But Sh’lok wasn’t accepting delivery on the teasing. “John, your life is in danger! You can't take the risk.”

John spent a moment regarding the creature. It hadn’t moved again, and the little cavern was echoing with the deep throbbing pulse-like beat they’d first heard when it appeared and had seemed surprised to come across them. _Not a threatening sound,_ John thought. _Though how much context have I got for that judgment?_

He shook his head. “It seems to be… waiting,” he said. _And for what?_

When Sh’lok spoke again his voice was back under control again, but there was a different edge on it now: the subdued but unmistakably present annoyance of an officer who was doing his job of advising his Captain, and felt his advice was being ignored. “I remind you, it's a proven killer. I'm on my way. Sh’lok out.”

 _Terse for him,_ John thought as he moved carefully sideways, looking for a spot to sit down and wait for Sh’lok. _When we’ve got this sorted out, assuming this whole area hasn’t melted down into radioactive slag by then, I’m going to hear about this over the chessboard. And probably get some punishment…_

The creature watched John move, but aside from a little shuffling in place, it didn’t shift position in any significant way, and the purring/pulsing/throbbing sound got slower. John found a place where the cavern wall was straight and smooth enough for him to put his back up against it comfortably, and squatted down there, eyeing his odd companion.

“Well,” he said. _“Now_ what do we do? Just talk it over?”

It wasn’t as if he was actually expecting an answer—but nevertheless he got one. John lifted his phaser again as the creature moved. But it came no closer—merely turned to show him its far side. _Its front,_ John thought, _or what was its front when we saw it last—_ The spot from which their phasers had blasted the fibrous “armour plating” away had puffed up into a pale, swollen, slick-looking mass, like a blister about to break. 

John regarded this half with interest, half with regret. “Well, you can be hurt, can't you,” he murmured.

The creature turned that side of it to the wall again, then seemingly settled once more.

“And now what?” John said softly. “We just sit here? It's your move…”

But no move seemed forthcoming. A few seconds later, the sound of footsteps brought John’s head up. At the curve of the nearby tunnel, Sh’lok appeared and took in the tableau at a glance. The creature immediately started to move in his direction, and Sh’lok instantly raised his phaser to fire.

 _“No no!”_ John said, holding out a hand urgently to stop him. “Don't shoot!”

Sh’lok threw a glance at John that suggested he had grave concerns about his Captain’s sanity. But when he turned his attention back to the creature, though he didn’t lower his phaser, John could see the Vulcan’s expression alter when he saw the creature’s wound.

For a few moments more the tableau held. Then, slowly, the creature shuffled back into its original position. While it moved, John covered it with his phaser. With his free hand, meanwhile, when the creature was settled again, he gestured his First Officer closer. “Come on over, Mr. Sh’lok.”

Slowly and cautiously Sh’lok walked over to join him, watching the creature all the while. Finally he crouched down beside John. “Fascinating,” Sh’lok said, allowing himself a glance at John once he seemed to have satisfied himself that for the moment the creature was sufficiently still. “It's made no moves against you?”

John shook his head. “No. It just seems to be waiting.” He shrugged. “I tried talking to it,” he admitted, mostly for the joke’s sake, “but it didn't do any good.” Not that he’d expected to. _And there’s our problem. How do you communicate with something like this?_

Sh’lok glanced away from John, then, and at one of the nearby piles of silicon nodules, indicating it with his phaser hand.

John nodded. “Yes, they’re all through here, all over the place. Thousands of them.”

“Yes,” Sh’lok breathed. “I see.”

“Does it means something to you?”

Sh’lok nodded slightly, looking distracted. “Possibly the answer, Captain, but I'm not certain.”

They both looked over for a moment at the—waiting?—creature. Then, with the air of someone who’d made a decision, Sh’lok said, “Captain. You are aware of the Vulcan technique of the joining of two minds—”

John looked at Sh’lok with concern, as he was extremely aware of it. Had  Sh’lok not performed a mind meld on the unhappy Dr. Simon von Gelder some weeks previously, the man would have been unable to warn Lestrade about the “neural neutraliser” machine that was at that very moment being used in the penal colony on Tantalus V to reprogram John’s brain into doing some very unwholesome things. The procedure that had saved both von Gelder and Watson was a very old and mystery-shrouded Vulcan practice that had taken a terrible toll on Sh’lok (as John knew because Lestrade had showed him video after the fact). The ordeal had been harrowing to view… and until today, if Sh’lok had brought it up John would have forbidden him to even consider doing such a thing again.

 _But there are lives at risk. A_ lot _of them, here and on other worlds where the lack of pergium is going to start killing people—_

There was another problem, though. At Tantalus V, Sh’lok had been uncertain enough about the technique working even on a human. John shot a glance at the creature that was apparently regarding them from the stony floor. “You really think you can get through to that thing?”

“It's possible.” And damn it all, there was that gleam in Sh’lok’s eyes—that indomitable curiosity, that unquenchable desire to unravel the unknown. This creature was a puzzle, one Sh’lok was determined to solve.

“Mr. Sh’lok,” John said. “I know it's a terrible personal lowering of mental barriers. But if there's a chance…”

He glanced at John. “I’ll try.”

Sh’lok turned and slowly moved toward the creature. Immediately it shivered and backed away a short distance.

 _It’s his phaser,_ John thought. Without looking away from the creature, Sh’lok put the weapon back in its place at his hip, then took a step forward again.

The creature rustled a little in place but didn’t move away, and settled again after a moment.  With an expression of intense concentration Sh’lok moved a little closer, those big long-fingered hands clasping, working against one another for a moment, then spreading a little apart in the air like sensors through which he would receive some kind of data.

John swallowed. The hair rose on the back of his neck as the air around him seemed to start going thick with some sort of tension for which there was no merely physical cause. Sh’lok’s shoulders hunched a bit as if he felt that tension too, as if he was at the core of it.

Then he jerked as if something had struck him, and cried out in wordless anguish. John flinched in sympathy and forced himself to hold still.

Sh’lok’s hands, still held up before him, clenched into fists. _“Pain!”_ he cried, and John flinched again, as much in surprise as in fear: he’d never heard a sound like that out of the man before. “Pain…” The word was almost a whimper this time, fainter and less controlled: the fisted hands shook. _“Pain—”_

Without warning Sh’lok staggered backwards, loose-limbed, as if about to fall. John quickly moved forward to catch him and brace him upright. That smothering sense of tension broke, but John wasn’t even slightly relieved.

Sh’lok clutched at John’s upper arms, trying to recover himself. “That’s all I got, Captain,” he gasped. “Waves and waves of searing pain. It's in agony.”

 _And it’s not the only one,_ John thought, hearing the ragged edge of unexpressed compassion in Sh’lok’s words. But he had no leisure to entertain that thought any further, for the creature was moving again—away from them, though.

There was a little sloped-down patch of cavern wall behind it, and the creature slid itself up on this and clung there a moment, throbbing. The sharp smell of its corrosive acid fumed up into the air. After a few seconds it shook itself and moved back down onto the cavern floor, leaving behind it, to John’s astonishment, seven gently-smoking letters etched shallowly into the stone. 

They said NO KILL I.

 _“’No kill I!’”_ John said. “What is that, a plea for us not to kill it? Or a promise that it won't kill us?” Not that both sentiments weren’t positive, as far as they went.

Sh’lok shook his head. “I don't know, Captain.” Though the pain of moments before pain was still haunting his gaze, that gleam of interest, even excitement, was back. “But it evidently gained an immediate knowledge of us from its empathy with me. And in my brief contact with the creature's mind, I discovered it is a highly intelligent, extremely sophisticated being. In great pain, of course, because of its wound—but not reacting at all like a wounded animal. It calls itself a Horta.”

“A Horta,” John said, trying the word out. “A _Horta…!”_ He looked up as the altered possibilities of the situation started laying themselves out before him. _“_ Mr. Sh’lok, assuming it hasn’t been destroyed, we’ve got to get that circulating pump back.” He glanced at the Horta. “You must re-establish communications with it… find out where it is.”

“Captain, it has no reason to give us the device! And apparently every reason for wishing us off this planet.”

“Yes, I'm aware of that.” John paused,  If we could only win its—” And in a flash, it came to him. “Confidence—”

 John pulled out his communicator. “Dr. Lestrade. This is Captain Watson.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Grab your medical kit and come down here on the double,” John said. “I've got a patient for you.”

“Is somebody injured? What happened?”

“Never mind,” John said, “just come down to the twenty-third level. You'll be led to us by tricorder readings. Watson out.”

Sh’lok was regarding him dubiously. “John, I remind you that this is a silicon-based form of life. Doctor Lestrade barely even believes such life to be a possibility! His medical knowledge will be totally useless.”

His First Officer’s not-very-subdued arrogance as regarded Lestrade’s talents was certainly in place, which left John feeling reassured as to how Sh’lok was holding up. “He’s a healer; let him heal. Mr. Sh’lok, you must re-establish communications with the Horta.” He looked over at the creature, which hadn’t moved since its brief venture into lithography, and once again seemed to be simply waiting. “I want to know why it suddenly took to murder.”

The expression Sh’lok turned on John was a bit ruminative. “To obtain that kind of communication, Captain,” he said, “it will be necessary to touch it.”

John’s mind went back to Sh’lok unhesitatingly picking up the blasted-off chunk of the Horta’s hide—perhaps rendered fortuitously inert by the phaser fire, for all John knew. What if the Horta had simply been off-balance for a short time, frightened by what Sh’lok had just done… but was now recovering, and angry? _A completely different form of life,_ John had said. _With a completely different psychology?…_

He looked at Sh’lok. “We've seen how the creature destroys….”

Sh’lok returned the glance, and then simply moved back toward the Horta. John lifted his phaser again, covering him.

The Horta shifted, shook itself a little as Sh’lok came, but didn’t move otherwise. Sh’lok reached out a tentative hand. No change…

The Vulcan knelt, reached out to the Horta. Even before he touched it, John could feel that current of tension start shivering in the air again. With great care Sh’lok settled his hands in place on two of the stonier-looking patches, and under his touch they pulsed and the Horta trembled. Sh’lok’s eyes squeezed shut. Slowly he shook his head from side to side as if trying to concentrate on breaking through some kind of intangible barrier.

John watched, feeling the tension ratcheting up, and though this scene would have been enough to command his attention, other matters needed it too. He flipped his communicator open. “Lieutenant Commander Giotto.”

“Giotto here, Captain,” his Security chief said. “Are you all right?”

“Perfectly all right. Where are you?”

John could hear a mutter of voices behind Giotto’s. “At the end of the tunnel. Mr. Vanderberg and his men are here—” His voice dropped a bit. “And they're pretty ugly. Shall I let them through?”

“Under no circumstances allow them in here yet,” John said quietly, his eyes fixed on Sh’lok and the still-unmoving Horta. “The minute Dr. Lestrade gets there, send him through.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

He looked back at Sh’lok, who was still shaking his head; but the gesture was quicker now, more vehement, a gesture of anger and rejection. “Murderers!” Sh’lok cried, and fell silent again for a moment as if he was having to push the words out through painful resistance. “Of _thousands!”_ His face contorted. _“Devils!”_  

The Vulcan’s eyes opened as it was a terrible effort to make them do so. “Eternity ends…!” he said, his voice pained, forced as he struggled for words.

John watched the struggle in horrified fascination. “The chamber of the ages,” Sh’lok said, lower; and his eyes squeezed shut in pain again. “The altar of tomorrow—”

Another long gasp for breath, for words, and then the rage broke through again. _“Murderers!”_ Eyes half-closed, Sh’lok’s face twisted into a mask of rage. “Stop them. _Kill!”_ Another gasp. “Strike back!” And a howl of rejection and horror: _“Monsters!”_

John found that he was shaking. There was no way he could react any other way while watching his friend crouched down on the cold stone and battling for control, that proud, near-incorrigible rationality utterly derailed by grief and fury—by (whisper it) naked emotion. John licked his lips, swallowed, concentrated on keeping himself ready and in order.

Footsteps, then: someone running. _Lestrade,_ John thought. _He heard that last shout—_

At the curve of the adjoining tunnel, Lestrade stopped short, taking it all in: John, Sh’lok, the thing Sh’lok was clinging to. “What in the name of—?!”

John nodded him over. Slowly Lestrade joined him, staring at the Vulcan and the Horta. “What’s Sh’lok doing?”

John gestured with his phaser. “It's wounded. Badly. You've got to help it.”

“Help _that?”_

“Go take a look.”

Lestrade turned, plainly as fascinated by the Horta—now that he was over the initial shock of seeing it—as John was. Slowly he made his way over to the creature and knelt down at its wounded end. Lestrade gave the Vulcan a long assessing look before turning away to focus on the wound, activating his tricorder and the hand sensor synced to it. 

“The end of life,” Sh’lok said in a high strange monotone, somehow sounding almost resigned after the previous anguished cries. “Murderers—” And something more desperate. "And _used._ What does this mean? Does life mean nothing to them? How are they so cruel?!"

John wasn't sure what to make of some of this, and anyway at the moment his attention was mostly on Lestrade. The doctor waved the hand sensor over the wounded area for some seconds—then stopped to stare at the tricorder’s readout screen, and shot John an incredulous look. Lestrade opened his mouth as if to speak, then stopped. Apparently even in situations as stressful as this his bedside manner didn’t run to shouting diagnoses across a cave.

He got back to his feet and went over to John. “You can't be serious,” Lestrade said, indignant. “That thing is virtually made out of _stone!”_

“Help it,” John said. “Treat it.”

“I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer!”

John gave Lestrade a look: there wasn’t time to waste right now on their usual amiable bickering. “You're a healer. There's a patient! That's an order.”

The doctor juggled the hand sensor irritably for a moment, then went back to kneel by the Horta again. John looked back at Sh’lok, still clinging to the creature, trembling as it trembled.

“Mr. Sh’lok,” John said quietly. “Tell it we’re trying to help.”

A nod of response, no more. Sh’lok’s chest was heaving as if breath was an alien thing that he had to keep reminding himself to do.

“The mechanism,” John said.

“Understood,” Sh’lok said, again in the peculiar monotone, as if sharing control of his throat with something that didn’t fully understand how to turn breath into words.

But his face twisted with pain again. “It is the end of life—” Sh’lok said, or the Horta said through him: hopeless, despairing. “Eternity—stops…” Then a  gulp for air, and words that sounded more like they were coming out of a Vulcan’s throat. “Go out,” Sh’lok said, “into the tunnel. To the chamber of the ages.”

A minute movement of his head; John looked that way, identified the tunnel he meant.

Sh’lok’s voice broke again then. “Cry,” he said, through a throat thick with raw emotion, “for the children.” His head turned slowly against the Horta as he struggled for control. “Walk carefully—in the Vault of Tomorrow.” John saw, and for the sake of his friend’s privacy wished he had not seen, the tears that had begun running down Sh’lok’s face. “Sorrow—for the murdered children.” A sob, unmistakeable, of pure grief. Then control again, but not much. “…The thing you search for is there.”

John found it hard to move, he was so shaken (and yet also moved) by the sight of the the proud cool man he knew, not at all _reduced_ by the strange circumstances, but certainly transformed, into a voice for someone hitherto voiceless. “Go,” Sh’lok said. _“…Go._ Sadness for, for the end of things—”

It sounded like someone resigning themselves to their death. John swallowed. _And what happens if that creature dies while Sh’lok’s in its mind?_ The hair stood up on the back of his neck again.

“Go into the tunnel,” Sh’lok whispered. “There is a passageway. _Quickly—!”_

Immediately John turned and went, wondering as he did just who was urging him to greater speed—the Horta, or the man who might not be sure he could bear much more of the ordeal he was suffering?

 _Doesn’t matter._ John hurried through the bare tubular tunnel, heading for the end of it at the best speed he could manage, half hunched over—

And then he straightened up into the great high-vaulted space at the end of it, and did as he’d been asked: walked carefully, watching where he put his feet.

The cavern was at least the size of the _Enterprise’s_ shuttlecraft bay. Off from the sides of it reached other smaller caverns, all half hidden from view by the contents of this one—

Thousands of silicon nodules; tens of thousands of them, piled almost up to the cavern’s ceiling. Hundreds _of thousands of them,_ John thought. _More._ Many _more._

He came to a point where he could walk no more, because the nodules were piled up too high. Others, though, he could see, had been here before him: and they _hadn’t_ stopped. Thousands of the nodules were shattered and lay crushed and broken, scattered around and ground to fragments by machinery and boots, trampled on like so much garbage. _An oddity,_ Vanderberg had said of the nodule on the desk in his office. _No commercial value._ And hence, in his eyes, worthless.

 _But not in someone else’s,_ John thought, reaching out to one broken, emptied nodule and cradling it for a moment in his hands. _Someone who doesn’t need eyes to know what these are worth…_

Carefully he picked up the thing he’d come for, and headed back.

Halfway down the tunnel he could hear Lestrade growling at somebody over his communicator with that particular tone of annoyance that filled John with relief, because by now he had already learned to recognize the sound of a doctor who had a plan and was carrying it out. “That’s right, Lieutenant,” he snapped, “just beam it down to me immediately, and never mind what I want it for. I just want it! Now _move!”_

John ignored him for the moment as he came back into the larger manmade tunnel. The voice he heard speaking now was much more Sh’lok’s, dropped down into its proper depths again: but it sounded utterly broken and done. “It is time to sleep,” that voice said, slow and sorrowful; “it is over. Failure…” A long grieving pause. “The murderers have won. Death is welcome. Let it end here…”

“Mr. Sh’lok,” John said, not looking at him for the moment— not until he could get command of himself back again. He focused on the empty, broken half-nodule in his hand. “Mr. Sh’lok!”

No reply. “Sh’lok,” John said. _“Sh’lok!_ Come out of it.”

It took him some moments. Slowly Sh’lok opened his eyes, remembered what they were for; focused again, looked around him.

“I found the pump unit in there,” John said, doing his best to sound relatively casual while his First Officer recovered himself and his composure. It took more work than usual. “It’s in pretty good shape.”

Sh'lok got back to his feet and spent a moment putting himself back in order and regarding the reactor’s corculating pump—and also what John held in his hand. “I also found about a million of these silicon nodules. They're eggs, aren't they?”

Sh’lok nodded. “Yes, Captain. Eggs, and about to hatch.”

“The miners must have broken into the hatchery.” John said. “Their operations destroyed thousands of them.” He looked over toward the Horta. “No wonder…”

But there were other issues more immediate. “How’re you doing, Doc?” John said as he put the broken shell aside.

Lestrade looked up from his labors, which apparently (and very oddly) involved a large bucket of something sloppy, wet and grey-green. “I'll let you know—”

That was when John heard a sudden hubbub of voices down the tunnel. _Wait, I specifically told Giotto—_ But instantly John understood what had happened. _He said they were getting ugly. Giotto and his men couldn’t hold them._ And now—

The whole lot of them piled around the curve in the tunnel, Vanderberg and Appel in the lead: and then for a vital moment they all froze, even those of them carrying the Security team’s purloined phasers, as they saw what was there. Beside John, Sh’lok already had his phaser drawn and aimed at them. John flung out an arm and shouted _“Don’t fire!”_

 _“Kill it!”_ Appel yelled.

“The first man who fires is dead,” John said in a voice meant to sound like iron. Beside him, Sh’lok’s face had set at least as hard, and his phaser was aimed right between Appel’s eyes.

Vanderberg stared at John in outrage. “That thing has killed fifty of my men!”

“And you’ve killed thousands of her children!” John shot back.

Vanderberg stared. _“What?”_

“Those round silicon nodules that you've been collecting and destroying? They're her _eggs._ Tell them, Mr. Sh’lok!”

Sh’lok let his phaser hand drop to his side… but John noticed he didn’t put it up just yet. “There have been many generations of Horta on this planet,” the Vulcan said. “Every fifty thousand years, the entire race dies, all but one, like this one.” He nodded toward her. “But the eggs live. She cares for them; protects them. And when they hatch, she is the mother to them… thousands of them. This creature here is the mother of her race.”

“The Horta is intelligent, peaceful,” John said. “Mild.” Though on reflection that was perhaps a poor word to describe a being capable of the emotional intensity Sh’lok had been channeling. “She had no objection to sharing this planet with you… till you broke into her nursery and started destroying her eggs! Then she fought back in the only way she knew how—as any mother would fight when her children are in danger.”

Vanderberg had the grace to look horrified, even ashamed. “We didn't know. How could we? But—” He gestured at the floor, where there were a fair number of the unbroken nodules scattered around. “You mean if these eggs hatch, there'll be _thousands_ of those things crawling around down here?”

John shrugged. “This is where they live! They digest rock. They tunnel for nourishment.”

“And they are the most inoffensive of creatures,” Sh’lok said. “They harbour ill will towards no one.”

Appel had been looking as shocked as his boss, but was handling it with much less grace. He retreated back into a mode he plainly understood better; the business end of things. “Now look, we have pergium to deliver—”

”Yes, I know,” John said. “Here’s your circulating pump.” He handed it to Appel, who stared at it nonplussed. “You've complained this planet is a mineralogical treasure house if you had the equipment to get at it. Gentlemen, the Horta moves through rock the way we move through air! And it leaves tunnels. They’re the greatest natural miners in the universe.” John waved his arms in a let’s-all-see-sense kind of gesture. “It seems to me we could make an agreement, reach a _modus vivendi?_ They tunnel. You collect and process, and your facility’s operations would be a thousand times more profitable!”

 Vanderberg looked thoughtful, while behind him his men muttered agreement. “Sounds all right, if it’ll work—”

“Except for one thing,” Sh’lok said, his face gone quite still, and his voice flat and grave. “The Horta is badly wounded. It may die.”

“It won’t die!” came Lestrade’s voice.

Everyone turned to look. Lestrade was standing off to the far side of the Horta, now, with his hands completely covered with grey-green glop, and grinning from ear to ear. “John, I swear to God, I’m starting to think I can cure a rainy day!”

This kind of language from Lestrade boded nothing but good, as his normal mode of operation where prognoses were concerned was Postulate Worst Case Until The Patient Is Discharged Or Dies. Nonetheless John chose to err on the side of caution. “Can you help it?”

“Help it? I cured it!”

“How?”

Lestrade looked inordinately pleased with his own cleverness. “I had the ship beam down a hundred pounds of that thermoconcrete. Know the kind we use to build emergency shelters out of? It's mostly silicon. So I just trowelled it into the wound, and it'll act like a bandage until it heals.” He rubbed his gloppy hands together and reached for a towel, still grinning. “Take a look. It's as good as new.”

The look of it was something John couldn’t gauge, but there was no arguing with the fact that the space was filling up with that rumbling pulsing sound, strong and loud—and it now sounded more like a purr than ever. He turned to Sh’lok. “Well, Mr. Sh’lok, I'm going to have to ask you to get in touch with the Horta again and tell her our proposition. She and her children can do all the tunnelling they want. Our people will remove the minerals, and each side will leave the other alone. Think she'll go for it?”

“It seems logical, Captain,” Sh’lok said. “The Horta has a very logical mind. And after close association with humans—” and for John at least there was no missing the momentary glance Sh’lok shot at Lestrade— “I find that curiously refreshing.”

 

* * *

 

There were of course loose ends to tie up after such a mission. In the immediate aftermath, some members of the slightly-the-worse-for-wear Security team needed to be seen in Sickbay. John made sure to spend some time  down there so they could both formally and informally debrief themselves with him, and so that he could groan with them over the bruises and bumps they’d acquired when Vanderberg’s men had jumped them and clubbed them into submission.

Fortunately no one had anything worse than a concussion—Giotto had picked that up—except, of course, for the young officer who’d given his life on duty down in the tunnels on Janus VI. His paperwork was waiting on John’s desk. Reynaud, his name was: Jules Reynaud. John sighed at the thought of composing another of those letters to Ensign Reynaud’s family. But that was part of this job as much as the happier parts, and for some time now he had been learning to accept it. 

Also to be dealt with was the formal registration with Starfleet of a new alien lifeform—some urgency being added to the business due to that species also being the original indigenous species of a planet that had a Federation-sponsored facility on it, but no legal agreement to buttress that presence. Naturally the _Enterprise_ had a paralegal crewman aboard, seconded there from the Adjutant-General’s office (it was Lieutenant Arbuthnot, a small quiet fair-haired woman who John more normally saw on tours of the _Enterprise’s_ small flourishing hydroponics facility: she was also a xenobotanist). She started the legalities rolling, and to John’s eye they looked nearly impenetrable; but to his relief, all he would have to do was sign off on the preliminary agreement Arbuthnot derived from the already-extant boilerplate.

While this paperwork was going through its various stages, John took time to consult with Lieutenant Donovan as to what communiques had come in from Starfleet while he’d been occupied on Janus VI. As he’d expected, Fleet had sent _Odyssey_ off to the Mizar system in _Enterprise’s_ place, and there was no need to depart in any hurry to make their next scheduled port of call, which was Deneva.  _Enterprise_ could actually be there a touch ahead of schedule by increasing its previously-planned speed by no more than half a warp factor. John therefore realized that he and his ship were in possession of perhaps seventy-two “slack” hours during which they could breathe and take stock before moving on.

And that turned out to be just as well… because that was the point at which matters became unexpectedly complicated.


	6. ACT FIVE

John’s realization that the _Enterprise’s_ work at Janus VI wasn’t entirely over didn’t start until fairly late on that initial too-busy day. After Sickbay (and a good long while spent listening to Lestrade bragging, not without reason, about his brilliance at improvisation in the medical mode), after an hour spent in his own quarters logging the hard facts of the events surrounding their meeting with the mother Horta, and its resolution—because such logging was always best done right after the events if at all possible—after all that, John wound up in the Officers’ Mess again for some dinner.

After ingesting a solid and unexciting korma curry based on some synthesized protein John found himself weary enough not even to care about trying to identify, he wound up nursing an anodyne glass of a Mars-colony-inspired craft beer (Mrs. Hudson had quite a reputation as a brewer left over from her reportedly crazy engineering-school days, whenever those might have been, and the ship’s commissary used several of her recipes). John sat there a while alternately reading on his padd and listening idly to the conversation of other officers who came and went, greeting their Captain casually but otherwise (as was the accepted protocol) going about their own business and leaving him to his.

After a while the door to the Mess opened to reveal Sh’lok standing there with his own padd in one hand, pausing to glance around in a peculiarly uncertain way, as if not quite sure what he was doing there. John waved him over, and Sh’lok fetched a glass of water from the food hatch and joined him at his little table.

“Not worried about that slowing you down now?” John said under his breath, with a smile.

“Not as such, sir,” Sh’lok said, and had a drink of it.

John gave him a look. “Sh’lok,” he said, “we’ve talked about this. We’re in the Mess. Ease up on the discipline a bit.”

He had another drink of the beer, which was all right as far as flavour went but had a tendency to go flat quickly. “Are you eating?” he said, because Sh’lok’s personal tendencies aside, Vulcans could and did go without regular meals for surprisingly long periods.

“Perhaps later,” Sh’lok said. John nodded. He’d been spending time lately introducing Sh’lok to the vegetarian side of Indian food (and having a lot of innocent and not-so-innocent fun introducing him to the hotter chilies). But the next lesson could keep.

“Chess?” John said.

Sh’lok tilted his head “yes” and got up to bring over the 3D board and the pieces. When he sat down and they began setting up the pieces in their starting position, John knew he couldn’t let this particular issue go unhandled for even a second longer. He said, “Sh’lok, I wonder if you’d explain something to me.”

“Of course, C— John.”

“I want you to tell me everything, absolutely _everything_ there is to know, about the Polish Sicilian Level-2 Countergambit,” John said, “…Collapsed.”

Their eyes met across the chess board, between levels two and three. Sh’lok’s gaze was absolutely guileless… but after a moment the corner of his mouth twitched. “I can of course—I think your phrase would be ‘talk you through it’ —if that’s your preference,” Sh’lok said, “but the subject can be quite dry and you may find the illustrated tutorial in the ship’s data banks of more use.”

John nodded, privately amused by how much could be said along the lines of _I’m almost sure I know what you did but I’m not going to do anything so crude as rub your nose in it_ without actually saying the words. “I’ll have a look at it,” he said, “and see what it does for me. Meantime—” He eyed the board. “Let’s play.”

They chose up pieces and began. Sh’lok got white, as he always did when John held the pieces hidden in his fists for the choosing. _I’ve got some tell I don’t know about,_ John thought. _Someday I’ll find out what it is…_ What began to reveal itself next, though, was a rather odd game quite devoid of Sh’lok’s usual dash and fireworks; a slow steady opening-out of position that spread itself gradually among the levels, like some thorny flower opening in slow motion. _His mind’s elsewhere,_ John thought. Not that Sh’lok couldn’t play perfectly brilliantly while distracted. But John put this together with that odd hesitancy in the doorway and knew something was going on.

The game continued. The Mess emptied out around them, people heading off for end-of-shift rest or to other business, until the two of them were alone. The lights around them, in obedience to the ship’s programmed-in diurnal rhythms, dimmed down by imperceptible degrees until the only bright light in the place was focused on the chessboard.

Sh’lok had left a queen’s pawn in an undefended uplevel position for some moves as if trying to suggest that he’d forgotten about it (which was ridiculous) or that he was intending to use it to spring some kind of trap (which as far as John could tell looked unlikely, but this was, after all, Sh’lok). _So the question is, does he want to talk about whatever’s going on? Let’s find out._

John bounced an available knight up one level and took the ostentatiously vulnerable pawn, seeing that in doing so there were two different ways he was exposing his lower-board position to attack.

“Would I be at all correct,” he said, examining the board, “in saying that I think you’ve got something you want to do that you’d like to ask me about, but it’s weird enough that you’re concerned that I might say no and you might need to go ahead and do it anyway?”

Those odd light eyes, more blue than silver in this light, met John’s across the board again, and the look in them was both surprised and encouraged. “Perhaps,” the Vulcan said, “partially correct.” And he reached up and dropped his queen down two levels and took one of John’s bishops.

 _Ow,_ John thought. _And whose mind isn’t on his game now?_ “Well, come on, Sh’lok,” John said, “don’t keep me in suspense. It’s been a long day.”

Sh’lok nodded, gazing at the board. “With your permission,” he said after a moment, “I think it would be useful if I revisited the Janus VI facility for a time.” He was quiet for a moment, studying the board: or seeming to. “Tomorrow morning planet time, I would say, would be ideal. But no later, I think. Even tomorrow afternoon might be too late.”

John thought about that timing and jumped to what he thought might be a possible conclusion. “Of course,  Sh’lok,” he said. “The baby Hortas are going to hatch pretty soon, aren’t they? Makes perfect sense that the event should be documented. For Science.” That was the most readily-available excuse, of course. “And there’s no time to get a dedicated team out here to do observations. Naturally the job falls to us.”

Sh’lok’s gaze locked on his. “John,” he said, holding his face perfectly still: _purposely withholding any revelation,_ John thought. “As regards logical reasoning, I believe there may be hope for you yet.”

Not for the first time, John wondered how other starship captains had reacted when Sh’lok had said things like this to them. _But then again… has he ever before had anything like our context from which to say them?_ Privately John doubted it, as the Vulcan’s performance evaluations, when John had finally pulled them, though filled with praise for his talents had been equally full of disappointment with his “attitude”. The most memorable evaluation had come from _Intrepid_ , whose Captain—plainly glad to get rid of a difficult Science Officer—had described Sh’lok, in probably the worst language a hidebound Vulcan well into his second century could summon up, as “regulations-averse”.

 _Understatement of the century,_ John thought. Sh’lok was the kind of officer who obeyed regulations as long as he firmly believed they were both logical and worth obeying. But that judgment of worth sometimes proved exquisitely situational. _He has a strong moral compass,_ John thought. _But the needle swings…_

 _And what good’s the compass if it_ doesn’t? _That’s what it’s built for._

 _And anyway…_ The words “Kobayashi Maru” drifted by in the back of John’s mind. _Some regulations are more worth being averse to than others._

“Well,” John said after a moment. “I’m sure no one would pay you any particular attention if you went down there to record the blessed event. Everybody knows how crazy we starship types are for piling up all kinds of scientific knowledge. And as far as Vanderberg’s concerned, I’m sure he’ll let us have the run of the place day or night, he’s so pleased with us right now.”

And John moved a sacrificial pawn up a level, then sat back and waited.

Sh’lok regarded this move for a moment, plainly registering its symbolic quality as an invitation to take advantage. “In answer to your question regarding the hatching,” he said, “yes. Very soon. A matter of hours, if my reading of the Mother's timesense is correct… which I believe it is. The imminence of the hatching was one reason she became so desperate that she was willing to risk stealing that pump.”

He looked across the board at John, plainly making up his mind. “And that same imminence now triggers another issue," Sh'lok said, “an urgent one, for which time to successfully resolve it is quickly running out.”

“All right,” John said. “Tell me.” _Because this’ll be the bit he’s not sure about getting permission for, and he really_ wants _to get it because he’s going to do it anyway..._

Sh’lok put his elbows up on the table and steepled his hands together. “When the mother Horta and I were joined in mind,” Sh’lok said—and there was something hesitant about his voice, which was different for him— “She communicated something rather disturbing to me.”

 _More disturbing than the concept that her species was in danger of being wiped out?_ But then again, Sh'lok had been deeply immersed in someone else's emotions... a situation that was inevitably going to be problematic for someone whose relationship with his _own_ feelings could at the very least be termed ambivalent. “Have to admit, she was saying a lot of things I didn’t understand,” John said. “Kind of a tense time.”

 “A difficult exchange for both of us,” Sh’lok said. “Naturally the urgency of the moment mandated that the most immediate crisis be dealt with first. But I saw in the mother Horta’s mind that some of the killings that occurred before we came here did not involve her and her victims alone.”

And he paused, as if waiting to see how his Captain would react to this.

At first John was confused. Then— “Wait,” he said. “I remember.” _Used,_ the memory cried out in Sh’lok’s voice, anguished. _What does this mean, does life mean nothing to them, how are they so cruel?!_

He stared at Sh’lok. Sh’lok stared back, the shadows of the Horta’s pain clearly visible in his eyes as his hands clasped each other as they had in the tunnel, worked together. “There is a murderer loose down there on Janus VI, John. And if we leave without determining his identity, he may well kill again… this time _without_ using a Horta as a murder weapon.”

John’s mouth fell open.

The hands relaxed just enough to steeple themselves again, but there was nothing restful about the gesture: they pressed together hard. “The first times when the Horta’s eggs were destroyed,” Sh’lok said, “the most significant breakages, in terms of numbers, involved automated mechanical mining machinery. The devices’ own sensor equipment was poorly suited to detecting a Horta visually, and incapable of detecting her as a life form. If they read her at all, it was as just another lump of stone. A pity, as if she had been detected earlier, many of the killings could have been averted.”

Sh’lok looked resigned. “In any case, the breakages, especially in such amounts, instantly alerted her. The simplest way in which I can describe the alerting mechanism is to say that when the eggs were broken, the mother Horta could scent them—though the actual sensory mechanism is far more complex than anything merely olfactory, and I don’t as yet pretend to understand it.” John noted the “as yet” and carefully restrained any smile. “The species appears hardwired to pay immediate attention to such scents, as humans are hardwired to be alarmed by an infant’s cry. It is a survival mechanism.”

“Yes, of course,” John said.

“Equally hardwired,” Sh’lok said, “was the mother Horta’s reaction on finding a human miner in the presence of newly broken eggs, when she finally _did_ find one there. She instantly acted to neutralize the threat, to stop that creature from destroying any more eggs. That was how the first few killings happened. 

“But the destruction did not stop there.”

The hair was going up on the back of John’s neck again as an awful possibility began to suggest itself to him. 

“I saw, in the mother Horta’s memory, something very strange. Repeatedly eggs began to vanish from their proper places and appear in places where they had no business being—for the Mother knows all the hatchery caverns intimately, having patrolled them diligently for years. Once removed to those new locations, the eggs were purposefully destroyed.” Sh’lok’s gaze locked on John’s. “Again and again she was lured to those places by the breakages. Again and again on reaching such locations she inevitably found an alien creature there, and killed it. Finally she realized that this was doing no good. She was going to have to go on the offense, and attack first.”

There was no getting away from the conclusion. “Somebody down there,” John said slowly, “put it together, didn’t they. They realized that where ‘silicon nodules’ got broken, very shortly after that, men died.”

“And that ‘somebody,’” Sh’lok said, “repeatedly put other Janus VI personnel in places and situations where they would die—destroyed so completely there was not even any forensic evidence left. So if anyone, early on, had notions about collecting such, they soon abandoned them. Besides, with a ‘murdering monster’ at large in the tunnels, shortly no one was terribly eager to go out there at all. In any case, at the moment I estimate that perhaps thirty of the fifty-four killings were actually murders in which the mother Horta was manipulated into being the deadly weapon. Eventually even _she_ put it together. That being the point at which she decided a more active role was required, however much anguish it caused her.”

Sh’lok leaned back in his chair, hands more loosely steepled now. “Potentially it could have been the perfect crime,” he said. “One with no witnesses… or rather, a single witness who couldn’t speak or make itself understood. And when news got out that the _Enterprise_ was on her way, the murderer would have been absolutely delighted at the prospect; for if we performed as expected, _we_ would dispose of the murder weapon.”

John shook his head, dropped it into his hands for a moment. “Oh, God,” he said again; then looked up. “…But Sh’lok, _why?”_

“Unknown,” the Vulcan said. “Data for exact motive is lacking, and without data…”

“Yes, I know,” John said, feeling a bit sick as he considered the whole ugly situation. “You won’t extrapolate, which makes sense.”

“But even in the best of circumstances, even with appropriate psychological monitoring,” Sh’lok said, “all species that evolve on planet surfaces come under significant strain when living and working for extended periods in confined artificial environments of any kind… and underground mining colonies would certainly be exemplary for their harshness in that regard. That said, even without psychological issues being invoked, in their residential areas and their workplaces and even in their leisure time, right across all the worlds where they live…” He looked a bit grim. “Humans remain human.”

Sh’lok fell silent. “Meaning,” John said, “we bring our passions and irrationalities with us wherever we go. Our frustrations… our hatreds.”

“Yes,” Sh’lok said, looking relieved that he hadn’t had to be the one to say it. “But whatever the motivation might have been, now the circumstances have changed. Now the murderer will know that his murder weapon has not only been preserved from destruction, but has acquired a voice. Now he will know that he can be incriminated. Now he will have motive to do at least one more murder. Opportunity to do it. And knowledge not only that it can be done, but _how.”_

Like a bolt of electricity, another thought went straight through John. _Not just_ one _more murder,_ he thought. _Because the murderer will know just who gave the Horta that voice. And will have motive to stop him._

He looked at Sh’lok to see if the Vulcan showed any sign of having followed the data through to _this_ conclusion.

“Regardless of the potential target,” Sh’lok said very evenly, “to depart Janus VI while knowingly leaving behind us an unapprehended murderer—indeed, a serial killer—would be deeply immoral.”

 _There you are,_ John thought, as the compass needle swung and unerringly found its north.

They both sat quiet for a moment, both pretending to look at the chess board. “Was the mother Horta able to identify the person responsible?” John said at last.

Sh’lok made a moue of annoyance. “Unfortunately, no. That early on in events, the Horta was subject to a problem that many planet-indigenous species first have when encountering aliens: she could not tell them apart. They all looked alike to her.”

“Oh God,” John muttered once more, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Even the issue of garments caused difficulty,” Sh’lok said. “Horta obviously don’t stand in need of clothes, and the fact that humans seemed to be wearing different hides at different times confused her further. And while the Horta’s sensorium seems exquisitely discriminating in terms of shape, scent and pressure, again, the overwhelming _similarities_ in these among humans were too close for her to successfully parse specific differences.”

John sighed. “Security video?”

“There is none in the areas where the suspect killings took place,” Sh’lok said. “Which might have influenced their choice for that purpose. The whole complex is under-surveilled due to the huge number and complexity of the tunnels. Management only places monitoring equipment in the drifts and adits where work is presently ongoing. They haven’t resources enough to do otherwise.”

Sh’lok sighed, reached down beside his chair, and put his padd on the table. “Between the time we returned and just before I arrived here,” Sh’lok said, touching the padd’s controls, “I used the ship’s scanners to attempt to plot the full extent of the Horta tunnels in the neighborhood of the mining facility. As expected, the Hortas’ delvings extend far beyond any excavations the miners have been able to open up in the last fifty years: far broader, far deeper.” He pushed the padd over to John.

John looked at the ridiculously complex pattern of tunnels and shook his head. “Into some of these,” Sh’lok said, “a good-sized statistical sampling, I had the Transporter chief drop a spread of remotely powered sensor devices to document them visually, as our scanners were not sufficiently sensitive to provide the necessary fineness of detail for my requirements. Take a look at some of these images and tell me what you see.”

John did. Tunnel after tunnel after tunnel, Horta-hollowed cavern after cavern… all gleaming smooth, many of the tunnels ridiculously long, intersecting and branching and interweaving in three dimensions. He shook his head, stymied.

 _“Look_ at them, John,” Sh’lok said under his breath. “What do all these tunnels have in common?”

“They’re all perfectly round in section,” John said. “They’re all quite smooth. They’re all fairly straight. They’re all…”

 _“Empty,”_ Sh’lok said, sounding rather as if his patience had run out.

“Um,” John said. “All right, yes. And?”

Sh’lok gave John a look that was both kindly and exasperated. “John, you see but you don’t observe. Though I _will_ grant you this much, that the issue here is not what is readily visible, but what is _not.”_

John flicked through a few more images, then gave up. “Talk me through it?”

“I doubt it will need much talking,” Sh’lok said. “Simply this. _Where are all the rest of the eggshells?”_

John blinked. “The _rest_ of—”

 _“Think,_ John! The Horta have lived on this world since, as your people would say, time immemorial. There have been hundreds of generations of them before this most recent climacteric. Yet only new eggs, from the most recent laying, as it were, have been in evidence since the mining facility was founded here. Many of the caverns in this region are of natural origin. Why were no remains of hatched eggs found at the time the facility was built? I’ve had time since we came back to read right through the administrative records of the colony—Chief Vanderberg was earlier, as you say, extremely accommodating now that production is once more running smoothly. And the initial geological survey team was commendably thorough in its initial survey of the site, even though they were driven primarily by commercial and financial motives.” Sh’lok’s disdainful expression revealed clearly what he thought of _that_. “Yet there is not a single mention of broken silicon nodules _anywhere_ in the earlier records.”

Put that way, the omission was striking, but John wasn’t at all sure what it meant. “So,” he said, “somehow or other, before all the Hortas were gone, their hatched eggs, the shells… went away?”

Sh’lok actually rolled his eyes. “Very, very obvious, John. _How?”_

The broken nodule John had touched had seemed fairly tough—unlikely to simply disintegrate. “They, I don’t know, they…” His eyebrows went up. “They’re mineral, the shells. Do the hatchlings _eat_ them?”

“I believe that theory has merit,” Sh’lok said; a formulation that John recognised as being as close as his First Officer would allow himself to get to saying “I think you’re right” without having evidence to substantiate it. “It may possibly be their first meal. I have no data from the mother Horta, unfortunately. But the issue is this: if the young _do_ indeed eat the eggshells, there is a good chance they will not stop with their own. Evidence of the murderer’s identity could be ingested and destroyed by them within hours unless action is taken. I’ve tagged the locations of all the murders, and there are a number of them sufficiently undisturbed that the odds are better than even that  identifying traces of the murderer can be found.”

“The evidence you’re worried about being destroyed—” John said. “DNA?”

Sh’lok shook his head. “There might be some,” he said, “but it would be difficult to find. My interest is in something that a modern-day human murderer would likely find of less concern.”

“What?”

Sh’lok smiled slightly. “Fingerprints.”

John looked at him, slightly confused. “Pardon?”

The look on the Vulcan’s face went positively scandalized. “Surely you know the basics about them, Captain,” Sh’lok said. “You do _own_ a set.”

John looked at his hands, looked up. “They’re, uh. Unique?”

“To every human being, yes,” Sh’lok said. “Ninety-nine percent of the mining here is done by machines, John, especially as regards work with rare earths and radioactives. Miners either work in radiation suits or in coveralls, but the use of hand protection for those using coveralls seems rare, which is logical enough: it would get in the way of operating the machinery. The silicon nodules were brought directly to those sites by the murderer, and the probability is very high that he would have handled at least some of the eggs with his bare hands. If I can find even two matching prints, even _partial_ matches, that will be sufficient to open a formal murder inquiry and force the Federation to send a complete forensics team. All that will then need to be done—the evidence having been acquired and preserved—is to get prints from the miners for positive identification of the guilty party.”

John blinked at that. “Aren’t their fingerprints on file?”

Sh’lok gave him a surprised look. “Of course not, Captain. When simple uncomplicated internal biometric and DNA sampling data is part of every worker’s or traveler’s basic identification documents, who bothers with a technology so antiquated? Not to mention so limited in its usefulness. There are thousands of hominid species scattered through this part of the Galaxy, and only Earth-originated humans and the Goneri peoples originating from the core worlds of the Mei Star Cluster even _have_ fingerprints.”

He pushed back from the table, stood up and started to pace. “In any case, there is a pressing need for the evidence to be found and secured as quickly as possible, before the hatching begins.”

“And not least because if someone at Fleet realises we’ve got a little spare time, and something comes up that gives them an excuse to need us…” Even so early in her mission, John was getting a sense that _Enterprise’s_ present performance was leading some people at Starfleet to consider her a panacea for the universe’s short-term ills. Sometimes it left him feeling chuffed, but right now such an interruption would just be a nuisance. “We need to get started.”

  “And no one at the facility can be allowed to know,” Sh’lok said. “The chance of the murderer getting wind of what we’re up to and immediately moving to destroy valuable evidence is too great.”

There was no arguing that point, though John didn’t like it much. “Mr. Sh’lok,” John said. “This situation poses a risk to you.”

“And to anyone accompanying me, John,” Sh’lok said. “As the murderer would surely realise that we would both need to be silenced.” 

And there it was… the predictable adrenaline-shiver. John stood up. “Then let’s get moving.”

“John—”

“Sh’lok,” John said. “If I don’t go, _you_ don’t go.”

Sh’lok held his gaze for a moment: then raised an eyebrow and nodded in acquiescence.

“And thank you,” John said, “for bringing this problem to me.”

“You are my Captain,” Sh’lok said. “It was… appropriate.”

John went warm all over. Yet at the same time, even the best-intentioned loyalty had its price, and more than one of them was liable to wind up paying it. “Mr. Sh’lok,” John said, for having been reminded he was Sh’lok’s Captain, it was now time to act the part. “At this moment in time, an outside observer would find all this dangerously subjective. And Earth-based authorities still have a blind spot, stupid though that may be, as regards evidence obtained through telepathic or similar means.”

He gave Sh’lok what he hoped the man would read as a warning look. “So since we’re at risk of making it look like we’ve meddled in the affairs of the Janus VI colony on an ill-conceived whim, and getting ourselves cashiered, we need to make sure we produce the desired result. Are we going to be able to do that?”

 _We, I said we,_ John thought. _I’m an idiot._ But the immediate look of approval and delight and _hunger to get going_ that flared up in Sh’lok’s eyes recalled that first fierce glad flash back in the transient officers’ quarters on Earth. “The odds—”

“No hiding behind the numbers, Mr. Sh’lok. Yes, or no?”

 _“…Yes,”_ Sh’lok said, and stood up, his eyes raking over the chessboard as he did; then meeting John’s again. “So let’s be about it, Captain. For the game is _on.”_

He headed for the door of the Officers’ Mess, and John got up and followed him.

 

* * *

 

In the turbolift on the way to the Bridge, Sh’lok had already started making notes on his padd. John leaned over to glance at them. “Mr. Sh’lok,” John murmured. “Surely you’re not intending to raid the facility’s computer for their crew rosters and work schedules, are you?”

Sh’lok briefly favoured John with a look that was starting to become familiar—one that said, without words, _You are my commanding officer but I really wonder sometimes how you execute basic functions like dressing yourself in the mornings._ “Of course not, Captain,” Sh’lok said, wounded and indignant. “…In any way that leaves evidence of anyone having done so.”

John simply pressed his lips together, nodded and turned away: the less he knew about what was to follow, the better… and if Sh’lok said no traces would be left, then that would be how it was. “Sh’lok, it occurs to me that while _Enterprise_ is here, she could assist both the colony and the Federation in getting at least partially caught up on the shipments to pergium-using planets that have fallen behind during this crisis. A smart use of resources, don’t you think?”

“Indubitably, Captain.”

“Of course we’ll wind up taking a little ribbing from other starship crews about acting like the sector’s most heavily-armed freighter,” John said, “but it’ll be worth it: lives saved, planetary economies restored to their proper functioning...” He turned away, oh so casual. “And of course for coordination with our own onward schedule, you’d then need to poll Janus VI’s computers to reference their shipping schedules and the rest of the pertinent shipment details…” Which would, John knew, invariably include data on what crews were doing what work in what areas to produce the shipments in question, as such data determined how much the miners were paid.

  “Captain,” Sh’lok said, “your thought processes in this regard are surprisingly…” _Devious,_ his eyes said. “Thorough.”

“Why thank you, Mr. Sh’lok,” John said. “I’ll clear that idea with Janus VI and log it for implementation. Once that’s done, though, I won’t linger. So signal me when you’re ready.”

The doors opened on the Bridge, which contained only its scaled-back evening crew at the moment. Sh’lok nodded and headed to his post, and behind him John sauntered in with the air of a man who was doing a last few chores before bedtime and went over to the short dark duty comms officer, Mr. Garrideb, and outlined the message he wanted sent to Starfleet, and what he needed from the Janus VI end. “Pass those authorizations along to Mr. Sh’lok when they come in, will you? And let me know if you have any problems.”

“Don’t think there will be, Captain,” Mr. Garrideb said. “The facility supervisor’s turned in for the night, but their night comms officer told me at shift change that Chief Vanderberg said to let us have anything we wanted, no questions.”

“Good, that’s good…” John said, and stretched. “Carry on, then.” He glanced around. “Good evening, all.”

“Evening, Captain,” the answer came back. He caught Sh’lok’s eye as he headed into the turbolift: raised an eyebrow. Sh’lok nodded to him and turned back to his hooded reader.

 

* * *

 

John got himself a coffee from the Mess in passing and made his way from there back to his quarters. There he drank some of the coffee, hating it but knowing that tea wouldn't have enough caffeine, and tried to read, and was unable to concentrate, and drank the rest of the coffee, and fretted.

Part of the fretting, he eventually realised, was due to once more coming up against confirmation that human beings could, indeed, be very nasty pieces of work. Often enough over the last few months the universe had taken a moment to rub his nose in that conclusion. And here he was again, left looking at a shadowy prospect that was in its way far less easy to bear or to come to grips with than even the oppressive darkness in the tunnels of Janus VI. _The thought of someone who could send other human beings, one after another, systematically, to be killed…_ Plainly the human heart was more than capable of generating its own kinds of darkness, absolutely blinding in their intensity and (to him) their alienness. _The Horta are more human,_ John thought, _than people who can act like that._

John sighed, stared at the empty coffee cup, thought about getting another, discarded the idea. _This is taking a while…_ he thought. He punched the comms button on his desk computer. “Bridge. Mr. Sh’lok.”

“Garrideb here, Captain,” the answer came back. “Mr Sh’lok stepped out about half an hour ago. Said he needed to get something from his quarters.”

“Fine. Patch me through.”

A pause, a few beeps. “No answer there, Captain. Shall I try his communicator?”

“No need, Mr. Garrideb, I’ll go dig him up. Watson out.”

But once the channel to his desk machine had closed down, John pulled his communicator right out. “Mr. Sh'lok?”

No answer.

_Oh God, he didn’t._

And the back of his mind answered him promptly: _Yes he did._

John swore under his breath, leapt to his feet, tucked his communicator away and found his phaser, which he’d left with such relief on his desk on returning to the ship in what now seemed a previous geological age. Then he forced himself to walk, not run, to the Transporter room. Outside it, he took several long calming breaths that he did not particularly want, and stepped in. 

 

* * *

 

“Mr. Anderson, you’re on late,” John said as he saw who was behind the console.

“Took a double, Captain,” Anderson said, casually looking up. “The night officer this week was feeling a bit under the weather; we’re taking turns doing her shifts. Looking for Mr. Sh’lok? He’s gone ahead.”

“Yes, of course he has,” John said, working hard to sound casual and not furious. “When did he go?”

“Maybe twenty minutes or so ago, Captain. Said he’d be back shortly, just needed to get some preliminary readings on something.”

It was all suddenly so clear. _He’s made himself bait to lure the murderer out, so he can present the miscreant to me all tidily wrapped up and ready to prosecute. Oh God, I’m going boost him to full Commander just so I can bust him back! I’m going to_ kill _him and then I’m going have Lestrade resuscitate him and then I’m going to throw him in the Brig for about a million years._ Sh’lok!!

Anderson, fortunately, was oblivious to these resolutions, and apparently saw nothing unusual about the situation. “I’ve got a fix on his communicator, sir,” he said.

“What’s his location?”

“Chief Vanderberg’s office. I can put you down in there a meter or so away from him if you like.”

“No, it’s all right, I want a quick look around outside first,” John said. “Just leave me outside the building near the office. There’s a window there that looks out on the facility…”

“I know the spot. Just to one side of that, sir?”

“Fine.” John was trying to sound casual and had absolutely no idea how he was doing, because his pulse was pounding too loudly in his ears. He strode up onto the Transporter podium, picked a pad, and stood himself there at parade rest, fairly certain that Anderson had not seen him draw his phaser and hide it behind his back in the process. “Energize.”

Anderson moved the sliders. The world whined and sparkled out…

 

* * *

 

Darkness, all around him. The overhead lights in the cavern were down at their lowest: the whole place was in shadow. Muffled by something solid, John heard a voice speaking; not loudly, but angrily _—_ _viciously_ so. John took just the second or so necessary to orient himself and then leaned very slightly past the edge of the office’s window, ever so slowly and carefully peering in.

In the middle of the room stood Sh’lok, hands clasped behind him in his own version of parade rest, and every bit of his attention bent on the man standing with his back to the outer office door. He was thin, wiry, in late middle-age, with salt-and-pepper hair and a creased, angry face. He had Sh’lok’s phaser, and it was trained on the Vulcan in a hand shaking with rage. _Phaser two,_ John thought. And he could see where the dial at the butt end was set. _At_ that _level if he hits Sh’lok there won’t be much left—_

On the desk off to one side were a number of pieces of shattered silicon nodules, large and small, stained and old. In places the dull lustre of their outer shells was splotched with something dark. John could see that the blotches were fingertip-shaped. _Some kind of powder,_ John thought. _Made just for revealing fingerprints, I bet._ He swore to himself again, because _of course_ Sh’lok would have something like that around, hidden away in one of the labs somewhere, or as Garrideb had said, in his quarters: probably homemade, and awaiting just this kind of opportunity. _Luck favours the prepared mind,_ the dry voice said in his memory.

“They deserved it, every one of them!” the man was saying in a voice that was both furious and deadly quiet. “I was here _years_ longer than any of them, helped them all— And what do I get for that? They all get promoted over my head, every fucking one, and all I get is ‘oh come on, now, Abernetty, you’re getting close to retirement age, what do you want a promotion for?—’”

“And for that sin, in your mind, they all deserved to die horrible deaths,” Sh’lok said in his coolest and most unmoved voice, one calculated to infuriate.

“They deserved to get out of my way, and when they wouldn’t do it by themselves I _got_ them there!” Abernetty shouted. “It’ll only be a matter of time before the company has to start promoting from the inside. Things are gonna change—”

“Indeed,” Sh’lok said calmly, “it would certainly be fair to say that _your_ prospects are about to change significantly. Killing a Starfleet officer as the latest in a string of serial murders will doubtless cause a noticeable shift in your career trajectory.”

“There won’t be anything left of you to prove I had anything to do with it,” Abernetty said, triumphant. “Been all kinds of accidents here that aren’t anything to do with cave monsters. People fall down crevasses, get buried under rockfalls, all the time. Snooping around the way you were, who knows what might have happened to you? And those others, there’s no possible way you can prove—”

“On the contrary,” Sh’lok says calmly, “it’s already proven. Before you followed me here I had already obtained evidence from four different sites that conclusively proves you brought Horta eggs to those sites and smashed them, causing the mother Horta to kill the fellow miners you sent to investigate those sites with reports of valuable mineral finds. Traces of their communications with you, confirming your multiple uses of that ruse, remained in the station's comm logs. Though you removed the messages themselves, you either lacked the technical expertise to remove the messages' timestamps and routing data, or didn't realize you _needed_ to do so to hide your tracks." Sh'lok's smile was smug. "That evidence, correlated with the times and locations of your coworkers' deaths, and the communicator ID I used to lure you here, clearly identifies you as the person responsible for their killings. All that data is already safe in the _Enterprise’s_ computers. The Federation will have it within hours. Nothing you can now do to me can change that. Also now stored in the _Enterprise’s_ computers is audio of your own confession. So if you desire to improve the level of treatment you will shortly be receiving from the authorities, it would be most logical for you to—”

Apparently less than interested in logic, Abernetty raised the phaser and pressed the trigger.

—and was instantly dropped to the floor in a looselimbed heap, struck down by what seemed to be a phaser bolt from outside. Except that it was _two_ bolts—one that drilled a handspan-wide hole in the window of Vanderberg’s office, and a second, not even an eyeblink later, from a phaser that while the first bolt was still firing was already being snapped down to stun.

 _So all right_ , John thought, standing there gasping, gripping the weapon two-handed and staring through the hole, _it’s phaser_ two _stun, and he won’t be worth much of anything for a day or three, but at least he’s still breathing…_

Sh’lok had staggered back a pace in reaction. Now he turned and stared at the window, and at John, and at the window again—

“Captain,” he said, in a strangled-sounding voice that for the moment had nothing even slightly cool or infuriating left about it. 

 _Well, maybe_ some _infuriating._ “No no,” John said through the hole, “just you wait there. There’s going to be shouting. Mr. Sh’lok, but it’s not going to be because of distance.”

John found his way around to the outer door of Vanderberg’s office and stepped inside. The first thing he did was head over to Abernetty and reach down to his throat to check his pulse. “Hmm, not great,” he said under his breath, and straightened up again, pulling out his communicator and flipping it open while looking into Sh’lok’s eyes the entire time. “Watson here. Dr. Lestrade.”

“Lestrade,” the doctor said. “John, after the day you’ve had, why the hell aren’t you in bed?”

“Needs must when the Devil drives,” John said. “I’m down in Vanderberg’s office. Just had to stun somebody, on two. He’s breathing, but I want to keep him that way.”

“Be right down. Lestrade out.”

John snapped the communicator shut and put it away. “Mr. Sh’lok,” he said, looking away. _“What_ did I tell you?”

“Ah, Captain. I meant to… that is, I…”

Whatever the Vulcan found to say, John knew it wouldn’t be a lie. But he instantly understood the impulse that would underlie any explanation. Sh'lok had wanted to keep John safe from any taint of failure if this venture hadn’t worked out. _And, additionally, he wanted to keep me safe from_ this _idiot._

John sighed. _He’s not going to be able to say it, though... so I may as well. God knows he’s had to live through enough painful emotion for one day. And some of it wasn't even his._ “At the last moment,” John said, “you became concerned. Didn’t you.”

“Ah. Yes,” Sh’lok said. “Sir.”

John rolled his eyes. “When we get back to the _Enterprise,”_   he said, “and have had some rest, say tomorrow some time, you and I are going to have a discussion about how we’re going to handle situations like this in the future. And this discussion will involve advanced concepts like _obeying orders without mental reservations_ and similar sophistry and fancy footwork of a kind that ill befits an officer and a gentleman.”

There was a brief and somewhat shamefaced pause. Then, “Captain,” Sh’lok said, “I will say only this in my defense. Abernetty was quite unhinged, and only my, ah, alien ‘novelty value’ saved me from being vaporized for as long as it did.”

“I would say,” John said, “that the novelty value had just about run its course, partly due to you ratcheting up the snottiness enough to keep him incriminating himself.”

“That is doubtless true,” Sh’lok said. He was actually sounding contrite. “But, Captain—believe me when I tell you that any human who had presented himself, even earlier, Abernetty would simply have shot on sight. There is no telling how many months he had spent dancing on the edge of a psychotic break before the events surrounding the breakthrough into level 23. Those seem to have been at least partially responsible for pushing him over the edge. At least the other humans here will now be safe.”

“Well, that will be almost entirely thanks to you, Mr. Sh’lok,” John said, putting his phaser up, “and my report to Starfleet will so indicate. Whether it will show anything _else_ , for example any suggestion of your egregious failure to _take your damn commanding officer with you_ when he orders you to, will depend on how well you listen to me when we have our little chat. _Am I making myself clear?”_

“Perfectly clear, Captain,” Sh’lok said. It was hard to imagine that deep voice going small, but it was trying.

John snorted down his nose and stood for a moment with hands on hips, looking around. “And the evidence is all aboard now?” he said, going over to the desk and picking up one of the broken pieces of Horta eggshell with its dark fingerprint-dusted patches.

“Yes, Captain,” Sh’lok said. “Not only high-definition imagery, but even the fingerprint data. While still on Earth I had had leisure to write a routine for the tricorder that allows fingerprint scanning and analysis when one is using a compatible supernanoparticle dusting medium. The whorls—”

“No no no no _no,”_ John said, putting the silicon shell down and rubbing his eyes. “For God’s sake, _not now._ Tomorrow, next week, next month.  Some other time. But right now, _no bloody whorls.”_

“Yes, sir.”

The air nearby hummed and sparkled, and Lestrade appeared with a first aid kit slung over his shoulder. He looked around him with a faintly aggrieved expression. “You two,” he said, “don’t you _ever_ get tired of getting in trouble together? I swear, you make each other worse.”

John could think of nothing to do but turn to Sh’lok and produce an expression suggesting he didn’t have the slightest idea what Lestrade was talking about. Sh’lok matched it.

Lestrade, utterly unconvinced, snorted. “Get back up to the ship and get some rest.” He glared at John. “Your sleeping habits lately have been horrible. You need to lay off the late night coffee. You know you hate it anyway. Now get out of here.” And he turned his attention to Abernetty.

 Sh’lok gathered up his tricorder, which had been lying on the desk, and the broken shells. “Here,” John said, and took a couple of them away from him as they moved a little way away from Lestrade in preparation for transport.

As they did, Sh’lok glanced over at the window. “Good shot,” he said softly, regarding the hole.

John glanced at it. “Was, wasn’t it.”

“Indeed. I would not have thought it possible to change the settings on a phaser so quickly.”

“Practice,” John said, “makes perfect.” _And motivation helps,_ he thought. _Because had that guy hit you first, I wouldn’t have bothered resetting for stun._ “Some one of these days, Mr. Sh’lok, I’ll show you how it’s done... once you’re back in my good books.” _Which, admit it, after you're done yelling at him will take about ten minutes. Dammit._

He reached for his communicator, flipped it open. “Transporter room? Energize.”

Together, they vanished.

 

* * *

 

Late the next morning, last-minute details—such as were usual for departure from a world where a mission had completed—meant that John had been in and out of the Bridge several times. Now, as he came in again with Lestrade at his heels, he thought he would at last safely be able to settle. And sure enough, Sh’lok stepped down from his post to stand by the center seat as John sat down. “Ship ready to leave orbit, Captain. Course laid in.”

“Very good, Mr. Sh’lok.” John looked him over without trying to be too obvious about it. Since dealing with Abernetty and returning to the Enterprise with his Captain, John’s First Officer had appeared to be in quite the chastened mood, wearing his composure somewhat clamped down. _But leaving aside our little tete-a-tete this morning,_ John thought, _he’s had a lot of emotion to process in the last twenty-four hours. More than usual for a Vulcan: or for a human. Still… everything’s squared away now._ And over the last few hours, as the two of them dealt with sorting out and logging the final details of the mission, John had seen this very battened-down affect visibly loosening up.

 _A terrible lowering of personal barriers,_ John had initially called the mind meld, accurately enough; and Sh’lok had plainly been in pain from it at first. But that had partly been due to the Horta’s pain, John thought, first the physical pain and then the emotional—and when those had both been at least somewhat assuaged, Sh’lok’s whole mien had brightened. Early that morning, when recording the first hatchling births, he had been like a completely different man.

 _Joy,_ John thought. _The joy of discovery, of learning, of the new._ It was at the Vulcan’s heart, integral to his being. _Maybe one of the reasons we got into sync with each other so quickly…_ For it counted for John too: one of the most important things, maybe _the_ most important one. The delight in the different, the excitement of finding it, the pleasure in how the differences combined. _It’s why we’re out here, so many of us in Starfleet. No wonder what we’ve got works…_

“Chief Engineer Vanderberg is standing by on channel one,” Sh’lok said, for all the world as if he hadn’t noticed John’s scrutiny.

“Fine,” John said, and hit the comms button on the seat’s arm. “Yes, Chief. Watson here.”

“Just wanted to tell you that the Federation authorities have been in touch,” said Vanderberg. “They’ll be sending a team by to evaluate Abernetty and finish compiling the forensics on the murders. I want to tell you, a lot of people here are seriously relieved. Seems like a fair number of employees have had bad feelings about this guy for years. Looks as if they were justified.”

“Well, you know the old saying,” John said. “Murder will out. It got outed in a pretty different way, this time. Something else to thank the Horta for, I suppose.”

“Speaking of, Captain,” said Vanderberg, “the eggs are hatching like crazy now.” John threw a look at Sh’lok, who quite early that morning had documented the first few hatchings, with the mother Horta looking on. Vanderberg, meanwhile, began to sound positively jovial. “First thing the little devils do is start to tunnel.” He chuckled. “We've already hit huge new pergium deposits. And I'm afraid to tell you how much gold and platinum and rare earths we've uncovered.”

“I'm delighted to hear that, Chief,” John said. “Once Mother Horta tells her kids what to look for, you people are going to be embarrassingly rich.” She, of course, as owner of the planet, would be even _more_ embarrassingly wealthy, insofar as that kind of wealth mattered at all to a Horta. The last of the legal paperwork that Lieutenant Arbuthnot had given John to sign had involved the mining facility’s newly formalised licensing agreement with the Horta species, and John for one didn’t feel the need to make too much song and dance about the fact that Vandenberg and his people were now all the Hortas’ employees.

“Hope you’re right,” Vanderberg said. “But I think we’ll do pretty well. And you know, it’s funny? The Horta aren't so bad once you get used to how they look.”

Out of the corner of his eye, John saw one of Sh’lok’s eyebrows go up. “Well, that’s about it, Watson. Thanks for everything.”

“Our pleasure, Chief. Watson out.” John hit the comms button, then glanced up at Sh’lok.

“Curious,” Sh’lok said. “That’s the second time I’ve heard something like that today.”

A memory that was only a few months old, but at the moment seemed to have happened about an age ago, tickled the back of John’s mind. He smiled slightly. “What was the first?”

“What Chief Vanderberg said about the Horta,” Sh’lok said, “is exactly what the mother Horta said to me when we parted company earlier. She found humanoid appearance revolting, but she thought she could get used to it.”

Lestrade trained an amused _oh-did-she-really_ look on Sh’lok. “Tell me, did she pass any comment about those ears?”

“Not specifically,” Sh’lok said. “But I did get the distinct impression she found them the most attractive human characteristic of all.” He produced an expression of faint pity. “I didn't have the heart to tell her that only _I_ have—”

John couldn’t possibly have left Lestrade to carry the can all by himself on this one. “She really liked those ears?”

“Captain,” Sh’lok said, with the air of someone delivering news of the utterly obvious to the woefully unobservant. “The Horta is a remarkably intelligent and sensitive creature, with impeccable taste.”

“Because she approved of _you,”_ John said, as if the obvious still stood in need of some justification.

“Really, Captain,” Sh’lok said. “My modesty…”

“Has yet to be located by even the most cutting-edge instrumentation, Mr. Sh’lok,” John said. “I’d have to say that, going by that metric, you’re becoming more and more human all the time.”

The Vulcan looked professionally offended. “Captain, I see no reason to stand here and be insulted.” And he promptly took himself all of two meters away to his post, from where no further insults could possibly go unnoticed.

Lestrade grinned and headed off. “Ahead warp factor two,” John said, and turned his attention to the viewscreen full of stars, and the road onward.


	7. EPISODE 2 SYNOPSIS

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Coming April 27...

s1e2: “The Denevan Problem” — _Enterprise_ is threatened with destruction and Captain Watson is rocked by personal tragedy when the ship’s mission to investigate a creeping wave of interstellar insanity reveals an insidious and deadly alien menace infesting the outpost world of Deneva. Watson must find a way to stop the spread of the invaders without also wiping out millions of innocent Denevans. But testing the only weapon capable of saving the planet may require a sacrifice John dreads and must still find the strength to make: his First Officer…

Visit the writer's blog at [caresatoland.tumblr.com](http://caresatoland.tumblr.com) for more info.


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